The new 6.65-acre South Point school campus in Mukundapur off EM Bypass is expected to be ready by the end of 2022.

Thursday was the foundation day of the Ballygunge school, which started its journey on April 1, 1954. The authorities have felt the need to shift to a bigger campus for a long time.

“South Point has survived as an institution of excellence for over 65 years but to survive for the next 40-50 years, we have to move to a bigger campus where we are not constrained for space as we are now,” said Krishna Damani, a trustee of the school.

“Parents are discerning and they want better infrastructure. The shift will equip the school with modern facilities and lots of options for sports and extracurricular activities,” he said.

A playground for outdoor sports and an indoor sports arena with facilities for gymnastics, badminton, basketball, volleyball and skating will be some of the highlights of the new campus.

The new campus being constructed Telegraph picture

The school, which now runs in two shifts because of space constraints, will run in one shift on the Mukundapur campus. From nursery to Class XII, the school has 12,000-odd students. The capacity of the new campus will be 13,500, a school official said.

The management had expected the campus to be ready by the end of 2021 but the Covid pandemic delayed the project.

“We are running behind schedule because of the pandemic. The work had to be stopped completely for four months. The impact became much bigger and it got delayed by eight-nine months,” Damani said.

Work on the new campus had started in November 2018.

“We expect it to be ready by end-2022 and we can start shifting the school in batches after that,” said Damani.

The new campus will be called the Priyamvada Birla Campus of South Point and both junior and senior sections, which function from different buildings in Ballygunge, will move.

The G+6 building will have multiple computer, mathematics, language, geography, psychology, fashion and robotics labs, libraries, art studios, three auditoriums and multi-activity halls.