MUMBAI: After quotas in admissions, there is a move to introduce quotas for living on campus too. The Union Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, under a financial assistance scheme, has proposed to carry out new construction and upkeep of hostels for Scheduled Caste students.
The ministry has directed all the engineering colleges in India, the ones that figure in the NIRF (National Institutional Ranking Framework) rating, to carry out a “comprehensive” need assessment/demand survey, to calculate the number of hostels that would be required for SC candidates. Details have been sought on the number of operational hostels for SC candidates, the count of such students on their college rolls, and the gap in the availability of hostels for SC candidates, apart from land for constructing exclusive hostels for SC students.
Institutes also need to indicate their willingness to manage day-to-day operations of such hostels. In the letter sent from the ministry, officials have noted that they proposed to focus on NIFR-ranked institutions in the implementation of the scheme “so that SC students are not deprived of the best education on account of a shortage of residential facilities.”
The department would implement the scheme, Babu Jagjiwan Ram Chhatrawas Yojna, under which Central assistance would be provided to state and Central institutes to construct/expand hostels for SC students. The department has asked for the survey findings from all the IITs, NIT, as also universities like Anna University, Jadavpur University, Delhi Technological University, Institute of Chemical Technology, Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute, and private institutes like Thapar Institute of Technology, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Thadomal Shahani Engineering College, KJ Somaiya Institute of Engineering and Information Technology and 250-odd engineering colleges across India.
Most colleges, however, feel students should not be segregated on campus based on their backgrounds. “When a student joins a residential campus like ours ... whether they are from the general category or the socially or economically backward strata of society, they are expected to come into this melting pot as students, only as those who have come to seek professional education,” said an IIT dean for student affairs.