‘Suffocated in classrooms’

Cramped classrooms, overburdened benches, almost static fans… each day in college is turning out to be a nightmare for students of HA College of Commerce in Law Garden, so they claim. The reason for their woes is ‘encroachment’ by GLS University, on whose campus their college is housed.

Forced to share space with the commerce students of GLS University (set up by Gujarat Law Society), HACC students say they are left with less than one-third of the space available earlier— they now have just 12 out of available 40 rooms. On condition of anonymity, they said that two classes are being merged, resulting in non-availability of space. Four students have to share one bench and, at times, sit on the floor, they say.

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To make matters worse, even the fans do not function optimally, resulting in suffocation. HACC has four divisions in each year of Bachelor of Commerce course. Each division has around 150 students. According to college officials, they have nearly 1,725 students, including bachelor’s and master’s degree students.

“The classrooms may be big but the benches have not been designed to accommodate four students. Now, as the divisions are merged for classes, we have to sit very close to each other. The rotation of fans in the classrooms is very slow, resulting in suffocation in class,” said a first year student, requesting anonymity.

Denying the allegations, college authorities said that they have adequate number of classrooms to conduct classes separately for each division. The students even went to meet principal Sanjay Vakil on Friday. He said, “We have four divisions for the three years. This means we need 12 rooms to conduct classes, against which we have 14 rooms. In fact, after GLS University started conducting classes in our building, we got two AC rooms,” he said.

Balchandra Joshi, registrar at GLS University, termed HACC students’ concerns ‘baseless’. “HA building has 36 rooms. They needs 12 rooms to run classes and currently they have 14 rooms, a library, an office, ladies room, toilets, new furniture and an auditorium with them. They are also given facility of air-conditioned rooms. The college has more than what it requires to conduct classes comfortably. They have nothing to worry about,” he said.

Why the space crunch

When GLS got the status of university, several SFIs were merged with it. However, HACC, a grant-in-aid college, continued to be affiliated to GU while continuing to operate from the GLS campus. When the varsity decided to offer commerce courses, classrooms from HACC building were earmarked for the same.