As many as 47 students of the two-year MBA course of IIM Calcutta have told the institute that they could not attend online classes because of poor Internet connectivity at home, an official of the institute said.

Second-year classes of the batch of 462 are scheduled to start on August 3.

The institute conducted a survey among the students after the issue of poor connectivity was discussed at a meeting of the academic council of the B-school on July 3.

The official said they sought to know from the students whether they faced any connectivity issue for participating in online classes. "We have received applications from 47 students, who have sought help in fixing the connectivity problems," he said.

Another official said the institute was studying the applications to understand the extent of deficiency in the network and was in touch with the service providers to fix the problems. "We are following a standard operating procedure in this regard," he said.

Under the procedure, a professor said, they are first checking the veracity of the applications. The next step involves identifying the service providers in the respective areas and sharing the details of the students with them. "We are also trying to engage alumni who might stay close by to use their resources for the students," he added.

At one point, the institute was planning to bring back these students to the Joka campus.

A members of the academic council said they had almost given up on the plan because of the travel restrictions.

Prof Peeyush Mehta, operations management group of IIM-C, said: "We are closely engaging with the students in order to understand the challenges they are likely to face…. Our effort would be to try to respond to these challenges with maximum hand-holding of the students".

Hunar Gandhi, the IIM-C student council president, had flagged the issue of poor connectivity in his June 13 letter to institute director Anju Seth that sought a fee waiver.

IIT Bombay has engaged the alumni to raise a corpus of Rs 1.25 crore with which they are buying students encountering connectivity issues, computer, laptop so that they can attend online classes from home.