IIT-B hostels to get makeovers

Updated on: Saturday, August 13, 2011

A hostel room is just that: a cubby hole you’re temporarily confined to. But as days roll by, you realise that a long chapter of your life is going to be spent warehoused there. From there came the idea of making hostels more than just habitable.

‘Make Hostel My Home’ at the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay was derived from that thought. Some hostels needed basic touching-up; others wanted to tweak the way a monochromatic life was going by within the perimeters of their world.

So while hostel seven received the bookcases they wanted, hostel six and eight require laundry mats, hostel four just got a new gymnasium and hostel two got a home theatre, a camera and some musical instruments they had wished for.

“MH-square is sliced into three parts—there are some everyday routines like cleanliness that students need to take care of. Then there is this invisible task of everyday maintenance—the leaking pipes, the wires that have snapped—that the institute needs to look into. But there is more to making a place better—that’s where the alumni contributions come in,” explained Bakul Desai, a director of the IIT-B alumni association, which is celebrating its decennial year.

"For students it’s not just about drawing up a wish list; they need to reason out the pressing need. When hostel four mentioned they needed treadmills in the gym, it was knocked off; the 550-acre campus is a large treadmill," said alumni.

“The idea behind MHMH is that an elected student body would conduct periodic audits of the facilities to develop an actionable correction plan and put up notices and post photos on the web for full visibility, which will make it easier for the authorities concerned to act. Students will take up the task of keeping their surroundings clean of debris, while alumni will step in to fund infrastructural improvements,” said IIT-B PRO Jaya Joshi.

IIT-B hostels to get makeovers

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