More students at IIM Calcutta want to be on the campus as poor Net connectivity at home is hampering their online classes.

Twenty-one students from the first year and second year of the two-year MBA course will be brought to the IIM campus in October so that they can attend classes from the hostels.

The institute has shortlisted 21 students after considering their requests in which they pointed out their Net connectivity woes. Complaints of poor Net connectivity have already prompted the institute to call students of the executive MBA course to the campus in September.

An IIM-C student from a central state told The Telegraph on the phone she had heard that students from Tier-III cities face Net connectivity problems. The condition of many other students will be “much worse”, she said.

“They are struggling to attend classes as the Net is poor in their area. I fail to understand what took the authorities so long… considering the issue of Net connectivity has been brought to their notice since mid-June,” she said.

The matter of poor Net connectivity being faced by students was discussed at a meeting of the institute’s academic council on July 2.

An institute official said the programme office was in touch with the 21 students to find out when they would reach the campus and was preparing a safety protocol for them.

“The safety protocol will be the same as students of the executive MBA course followed when they reached the campus in batches,” the official said.

A vice-chancellor of a state university who was present at a virtual meeting education minister Partha Chatterjee had with university heads on Sunday said the goings-on at IIM Calcutta showed what was waiting for the universities.

Chatterjee had said regular online classes would start in the first week of December.

Anil Bhuimali, the VC of Raiganj University, had asked at the meeting how students would attend classes as 70 per cent of them face Net connectivity problems.

Another student who is in the second year of the MBA course at IIM said the authorities were forthcoming in inviting students of the one-year executive course to the campus but were “selective towards students of the two-year course”.

A student spends Rs 27 lakh on the one-year MBA executive course and Rs 22 lakh for the two-year MBA course.

“Our first term is nearing completion but they are calling only a handful of students. Almost all of the 56 students of the executive course have arrived. We are being discriminated against. Apart from the Net connectivity problems, we are missing out on several other on-campus features of our course,” a second-year MBA student said.

Hunar Gandhi, the student council president, had on June 13 sought a fee waiver in a letter to director Anju Seth. “Would it be possible to allow some students, who may be facing connectivity issues or other constraints at home, to return to campus and utilise campus infrastructure even when classes are online? Can this process begin from now onwards as there is still a month before the classes begin? Students are apprehensive about the quality of learning through the online mode.”