In order to distinguish optimists from the rest of the crowd, here is a question that you can pose: How different would the fate of IITM have been if administrative changes and cutting-edge research had occurred at the same pace?
Whichever category of people you fall into, the very existence of this question has a deeper meaning tied to it. It reflects the fact that there is a dire need to rethink and modernize our processes. The responsibility for which is not only borne by the admin but also by the students who are affected by these decisions on a day-to-day basis. We are a crucial part of a reciprocal system that only evolves at the rate at which we voice our concerns and provide constructive alternatives.
On the topic of hostel room allocations, this article is a synopsis of student sentiment, struggles, and suggestions.
What Prompted This Discussion?
The Great Hostel Migration ft. Swarna-Sharav-Bhadra
The most organized form of chaos unfolds every summer around the ladies’ hostels, when the annual internship drive for pre-final year students kicks in. It begins with Swarnamukhi being vacated to accommodate freshers, and the sudden displacement sets the otherwise calm Sharavati and Bhadra hostels into panic.
To complicate matters, the pre-final year girls arrive early, while all three hostels already house summer interns. “Bhadra hosts the internship drive before the start of the semester, and guess who was sitting for interns? Me!” recalls one resident. The result is a situation where no one knows where to go, or worse, how to find a room that won’t ask them to leave the very next day.
Bhadra bears an additional burden: its first four floors must be vacated to facilitate internship interviews. Managers attempt to reassign students between hostels, often with limited success. “The Bhadra manager asked us to move into a room in Sharav, while the Sharav manager wanted us out… I was allotted a room in Sharav, and within three days, we were all asked to vacate again. Bhadra wasn’t accepting us back either.” While each hostel struggles to accommodate the incoming set of students, the outgoing ones are often left in a frenzy.
Double Down on a Triple Room
If you’re residing in an overfilled room and believe that the problem pertains only to your hostel, here are some eye-opening statistics. Nearly 40% of students who took our survey are facing the same issue. In Swarnamukhi, Sabarmati, and Mahanadhi, it is seen that triple-sharing rooms now accommodate four students. Over in Ganga, Mandakini, Swarnamukhi, and Tapti, double-sharing rooms have been upgraded to triple-sharing. And if you’re in Brahamaputra, Krishna, or Cauvery, single rooms now come with a roommate.
When discussing this issue with those directly affected, there is an overwhelming sense of frustration and helplessness. “We actually had to give up one of the study tables just to make space for everyone’s feet to touch the floor,” recalls one resident. “Sometimes, I wake up and there’s no place to even stand without stepping into someone’s laundry basket.” The numbers don’t lie; this is not just an inconvenience, but a reality for a large section of the student community. With the student body set to grow in the coming years, overcrowding has become a structural issue that needs to be addressed urgently.
The Life-Cycle of a Room
Step One: Moving In
Nearly 37% of the students we surveyed reported having to shift at least once before finally settling into their allotted room, with some having to make as many as three moves. Each shift implies hauling a semester’s worth of belongings from one room to another, and sometimes from one end of campus to the other. Every hostel currently tries, in isolation, to accommodate incoming students. But when each hostel functions in such a disconnected manner, the system inevitably fails those students who get caught in the shuffle.
Amongst the endless stories of room reshuffling, here are a few: “My room in Tapti was occupied by someone not from IITM, and my Cauvery room was assigned to people from Mandakini. I had nowhere to go—Cauvery was throwing me out, and the Tapti manager said that since the people in my room weren’t from IITM, they came under CCW, and Tapti management couldn’t do anything.” Another recalled: “I was asked to leave Cauvery one morning; we were given barely six hours to vacate, based on a vague message from the manager. When I went to Alaknanda, they told me that shifting wasn’t possible because the warden wasn’t around. So, for that night, they expected me to figure out where to stay just because the officials hadn’t coordinated properly.” These stories reveal the ad-hoc nature of this process. We need a system that recognizes hostels as a network rather than independent silos, and one that puts student stability and comfort above all.
Step Two: Settling Down and Asking for Fixes
Out of all the problems related to hostel rooms, the biggest challenge is perhaps making them truly livable. At the very least, a room should have a table, a bed, and functioning electrical facilities (including lights, fans, and a LAN port). According to our survey, complaints about the absence of these basic amenities constitute nearly 70% of all grievances. Every hostel has a mechanism in place for addressing these concerns; however, nearly 34% of all complaints remain unresolved.
No discussion about hostels can ever be complete without acknowledging the monkey menace. While the newer tower hostels have been constructed with monkey-proofing measures in mind, the older hostels suffer immensely from this problem. Monkeys frequently enter rooms and washrooms, creating chaos. They often contaminate water filters, rendering them unhygienic and unusable. Overturned dustbins and dirty corridors are, unfortunately, a common sight in many hostels. It is, in fact, unreasonable, even inhumane, to expect hostel staff to constantly chase monkeys or clean up after them. A robust monkey-proofing solution is urgently needed.
Step Three: Vacating the Room
The process of vacating rooms is deeply intertwined with that of allocation, and streamlining one would naturally improve the other. Along the lines of vacating rooms lies one of the most daunting experiences for any student – a completely filled dump room with your luggage stacked up at the very end. The inefficiency of the current system is a major complaint amongst students, with many reporting that their belongings were damaged or even lost in the process. As one student recounted, “In Mandakini dump room I lost my mattress, my cartons were heavily damaged, and my bucket broke.”
In a hostel with 300-400 residents, having as few as 3-4 trolleys only amplifies chaos, especially when all the students require them around the same time. The situation calls for more storage rooms, additional trolleys, and a more organized approach to stacking and retrieving belongings. Many students have suggested that mattresses, buckets, and cartons be stored in separate rooms to prevent damage, and that some degree of supervision or assistance be provided so that everyone’s belongings are handled with care. As one student put it, “Separate room for all mattresses; there was a torn mattress in one of the rooms and lots of people took other people’s mattresses because they couldn’t find their own, causing a chain reaction.” Another student added, “Bags, boxes, and buckets in one room. I found my box in pieces, and a router I kept on my box was missing. I recovered only half the stuff in the box, and my pillow was gone.”
A Narrative and an Unsung Hero
After a thorough analysis of the situation, one can only wonder what the reality of the current process is. What is the role of the CCW office, and where do those registers that are left on the front desk go? To what extent has this been digitalized?
To answer all these questions, we met with the chairman of the CCW office itself, Prof. Sanyasiraju V S S Yedida. Through the course of this meeting, we have been a medium of communication between the CCW office and the student body, conveying student feedback (collected through a Google form in August), asking pinpointed questions, and understanding the responsibilities of the student body in this entire process. To summarize the meeting in one line: What started out as an ambitious attempt to “fix” the hostel room allocation system of IITM, has now turned into its own anti-thesis.
We started the discussion in an attempt to address the summer chaos of hostel movement. What does the administration’s end of this chaotic situation look like, and how did we get here in the first place? Following the conversation with the chairman, we learnt that it all dates back to a Supreme Court ruling, which states that freshmen are strictly to be kept in separate hostels. This implies, as a rule of thumb, that Swarnamukhi and Mandakini are to be vacated every year before the new admissions process begins. Until nearly five years ago, the process was quite straightforward: one hostel, one room, for all of four years. Empty rooms of graduated students would then be allocated to the incoming freshmen, thus creating a cycle that is easy enough to understand and one that minimizes displacement. For the past few years, the process is no longer this simple; Swarna and Mandakini are the only hostels of requisite capacity that are capable of housing all first-year students, marking the beginning of a very long domino effect.
In addition to making sure that the two freshie hostels are vacated by the required date, IITM hosts a residential summer internship program. The dates are typically for two months, commencing mid-May; however, some leeway is provided to the interns in terms of their dates of coming and going, due to differing factors such as completion of the project, etc. That’s how you might find that your room isn’t vacated even at the beginning of the semester. Apart from this, nearly 4000 students visit campus for the IITM BS degree’s annual Paradox event. Add to this the fact that, IITM students also stay back here for POR work/prof projects; rooms aren’t empty in the summer either. The shifting of all these students is difficult to manage at a central level, and therefore the process has been delegated to each individual hostel. On human grounds, the office does not enforce a strict entering data(for our own students) and leaving date (for residential interns), due to which tracking of empty rooms becomes an extremely difficult task; the hostel manager usually allots you the first empty room, and you may end up shifting once more within your own hostel.
A total of 1700 boys then make their way to either Cauvery or Brahmaputra and nearly 300 girls to Sharavati. At the CCW office, a number-matching process is undertaken in order to assess the number of rooms which are free in each hostel, and a department-wise mapping is done along with the hostel affairs secretary. After this, the process is localized to each individual hostel and taken care of by the hostels committee. One important suggestion we received from the office was to create a Google Sheet. One that would be managed by the current General Secretary in correspondence with the old General Secretary, it should have the name and contact details of the current occupant as well as those of the incoming student. This will help the two students coordinate better.
The CCW office is aware of the issues related to multiple shifts; making the process any smoother pivoted at the apex level has a huge computational cost associated with it, one that they are willing to undertake to create a smooth transition system. One of their major goals is to minimize student displacement.
Keeping aside the issue of movement, there is one more problem that is prevalent: a very clear lack of infrastructure. The issue of over-occupancy was discussed at length. Here is the full picture: At the womens’ end of this, Sarayu has been shut down overnight; it usually housed interns and held fort when visitors came in during the middle of the semester. 2025 particularly, has seen a rise in the number of female students. The situation is so tight that accommodating even one more female student at this point of time will set Sharavati and Swarnamukhi into panic. The result of which is: multiple rooms in both Swarnamukhi and Sharavati are filled beyond intended capacity. For the boys, this problem has existed for long, and it is in fact now a well-accepted fact that Ganga double rooms are meant to house three students; so is the case with many boys’ hostels. There is no fix to this except for building more infrastructure. The process, which is governed by central authorities and one that neither IITM nor its residents can change.
The limiting element in most of the processes seems to be the fact that everything is centrally routed. A sum of 14 crore rupees has been allotted for fixing monkey problems; however, the entire process is stalled due to vendor issues. Yet, in hostels where the situation is dire, the office does try and make fixes. The bureaucracy of the process appears to hinder its progress.
The Way Forward
Despite a clear lack of resources, the office is not dismissive of student complaints and is accommodating of personal requests. There are still multiple issues to be resolved; the process is far from perfect and seems stagnant, but there is hope in knowing that they are aware of this and are trying to work towards improvement.
The primary takeaway from this entire exercise has been a shift in perspective. Every stakeholder within this process is facing the same set of problems, albeit to varying degrees. Ignorance was, briefly, bliss; we initially sought a major centralized “fix.” While nothing major could be achieved, it is at least clear that the smaller changes at our end will have the highest impact. At the risk of sounding cliché, change lies in taking initiative for your hostel wing and your floor, in engaging with the hostel committee, and most importantly, in being empathetic and following civic guidelines within hostel spaces.
