#ReopenKgp Series: Director’s Post
A year ago, on the 13th of March, 2020, the institute cancelled classes because of the pandemic. A year hence, when a lot of the issues are now behind us and the administration shows no signs of recalling students, the resulting student protest finally elicited a response from the official Director’s Facebook page. So there are a couple of things that the Director does address and a lot that he doesn’t. Here’s what we think of the response:
What the Director addressed:
Handling of the Covid crisis during the lockdown
The post talked about how the institute handled the Covid crisis during the lockdown. Forced evictions, messes not being operated with a full menu as the lockdown progressed, restrictions on inter-hall movement were amongst the measures. But right now, these are not topics of importance. We are a year past those events, we commend your efforts but the issues that crept up after the beginning of online semesters are way different, and that’s what we need answers for.
Web technologies for conducting classes:
For the people wondering what Microsoft Dynamics is, refer to this screenshot:
It is a package that has teams and SharePoint resources. But don’t get us wrong when we say this is the least we expected from an online semester anyway.
There was no mention of what was done for students who had internet issues. They cannot use all these resources properly. So how should have this issue been addressed? Recall those students. But yes, there was no mention of that as well.
Conductions of online fests:
Okay well, thanks. We had fun(?).
Restarting Gymkhana activities:
Oh, we do miss paying gym fees and not going there ever. But you know when that will matter? When we are on campus!
Current plans regarding call back of students:
“By May-June, we are hoping to call back the final year undergraduate and postgraduate students so that they would be able to complete their lab classes. By July, we hope to recall 50–60% of the students with due consideration of the SoPs and quarantine”.
This point raises several questions, the first one being wasn’t this period of calling back final years initially April? Why do we have such fluctuating timelines for calling back such a small section of campus (240 students according to rumours)?
We also had to consider the students coming from all over India including Maharashtra, Kerala, Punjab, Karnataka, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu from where a large number of cases are still being reported. This cautious approach is particularly due to the limitations in clinical facilities in the region, and the nearest facilities being in Kolkata which would take about 3 hours to reach.
The aforementioned points are just a summarization of things mentioned by the Director. Forth this point we shall address what points we think should have been addressed through his post.
What more should have been addressed:
Open House
So all these questions are going to be a dialogue. We ask a question to the Director, he gives a reply, we get more questions and we ask them more until we are satisfied. The open house is something that’s being requested for by every single student and we are pretty sure this would have been a point in the senate meetings too. So our question is, why is the Director not talking about it?
Technological issues (eg: network accessibility)
Some students can’t access the internet properly, and we would like to point out that they do still pay the fees. Shouldn’t they be given access to return to campus? Some of our sister IITs made steps to address this issue in various steps, has our campus done anything of these sorts? This brings us to the next point
What are the criteria for phase-wise recall of students?
There are research scholars who might need research equipment and final years who have labs. But as we discussed earlier, the students who have internet issues should be part of the first phase as well and as soon as possible. May is towards the end of yet another semester and these students won’t have access to the internet till then.
The workload of students, and possible measures to reduce it
One of the reasons that the moment began was because of the overload of the assignments and class tests in the online semester. The continuous evaluation hasn’t been stress-reducing but rather stress-inducing.
We urge credible replies from the Administration. Almost all of these issues could be addressed if we were to have an Open House, but there is no mention of this anywhere else. As you may have noticed this is just the first post of this series. Given the diverse array of responses we have got, we are yet to compile them and we shall be doing that soon. Do let us know what more points you think should have been included in Director’s response.
