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Second-year students at LSR asked to vacate hostel
New Delhi: At least 120 second-year residents at Lady Shri Ram College (LSR) for Women were on Sunday asked to vacate the hostel by October 31, as per last year’s
New Delhi: At least 120 second-year residents at Lady Shri Ram College (LSR) for Women were on Sunday asked to vacate the hostel by October 31, as per last year’s regulations that hostel would only be allotted to first-year students.
In June last year, the college had announced that its hostel will be available to only first-year students to ensure that more students from marginalised backgrounds could avail of hostel facilities. The issue had created a huge furore among the students, who demanded that the facility should be extended to all students.
Several hostel residents said they had received messages on Saturday, saying that they needed to vacate the hostel by month-end. The residents then called for a general body meeting (GBM) with the warden and hostel union members on Sunday evening using a videoconferencing application.
“We were told that we would have to vacate by October end. It came as a shock to us. At the time of joining the hostel last year, we had signed that it would be for a year but we had no option then. Throughout the year, we received several verbal assurances by college authorities on the matter. So we were not expecting this,” said a 19-year-old hosteller, requesting anonymity.
“How can we travel at such a short notice during the pandemic and shift our belongings? It is extremely risky for us, plus everybody may not have the financial means to travel at this point,” said the second-year undergraduate student.
Unnimaya P, a third-year student who is also a resident at the hostel, said, “The 2019 notification was opposed by the students and we had said that we won’t settle with any rule which puts the resident batch of 2019 at a disadvantage. There is no certainty pertaining to when the college will reopen. Why is the pretext of college reopening being used?”
While second-year residents have been asked to vacate, there has been no such notice for third-year students so far.
Hostel warden Ujjayini Ray said, “At the time of joining, the current second-year residents knew that the hostel was reserved only for first-year students. They were already aware that they had to vacate by term-end. The current third-year residents had not joined under this rule. So they won’t be asked to leave.”
“A new batch of students will be coming in and we will need to follow social distancing norms as well as implement the constitutional reservation. So we have to prepare the rooms, which is why we have asked second-year students to vacate by October 31. However, if any student cannot travel from their hometown and do so by then, they can write to us,” she said.
Ray also pointed out that the authorities had taken the decision keeping the reopening guidelines under Unlock 5 in mind. “Around 70 students who will graduate this year have already cleared out their belongings since August,” she said.
