IIT Kharagpur to call second-year BTech students to campus early next year: Report

NEW DELHI: The Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur has decided to call back to campus second-year engineering students from early next year, the Telegraph India reported.

The decision has been taken to aid students facing network connectivity issues who will get to attend online classes from wifi-enabled hostels after returning to campus, the report said. Earlier, the institute had only permitted students on campus who were having resource constraints, it said.

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However, students staying outside campus are facing problems in attending online classes due to issues like unstable network, power cut etc., therefore they have been allowed to join campus, the report said.

Recently, IIT Kharagpur decided in a special senate meeting that while some students will be allowed to attend offline classes, others will have the live streams of classes, as per the report.

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“We have plans to recall BTech second-year students irrespective of whether they are resource constrained from early next year. If they want, they can come according to the time slot they would be provided with and attend online classes while staying at the hostels,” the Telegraph India quoted Dhrubajyoti Sen, the dean of students affairs as saying.

He added that students will have to be double-vaccinated, the report said.

Around 500 students, mostly from second-year of engineering, who were not able to access online classes due to either lack of digital devices or non-ability to get recharge done because of financial issues, had been called back to the campus batch by batch in August, the report said.

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“We don’t know when we will be able to resume in-person classes on a campus that had to be shut twice over the past 20 months following a spike of cases. Permission is required from the Union education ministry for starting physical classes. But if students are not able to attend online classes properly, then we have to take steps to redress their grievances,” the official was further quoted as saying.

IIT Kharagpur teachers last week had written to the institute’s director VK Tewari, seeking reopening of the campus for physical classes from January as they felt there was learning loss amongst the students, the report said.