Acute accommodation crisis at RU halls

The university has 14 residential halls with 7063 seats but over 12,000 students now stay there. And 12,000 more students stay at messes or other places outside the campus, not getting seat in hostels.

A four-seated room now accommodates at least six students, some of them sleeping on floors. Students have to stay even at guestrooms and TV rooms, they said.

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The worst sufferers are the female students. The four halls for female students accommodate over 5500 students against their capacity of 2558.

Added to miseries, cadres of Islami Chhatra Shibir have "captured" a good number of seats at the halls, students alleged.

At Munnujan Hall, the largest one for female students on the campus, at least 1200 students live against its capacity of 839.

Some 1100 female students stay in the 720-seat Rokeya Hall, 1000 at the 525-seat Taposhi Rabeya Hall and 800 at the 464-seat Khaleda Zia Hall.

At Taposhi Rabeya hall, the authorities have arranged stay of 73 students at the common room. Students call the room 'Kolorob' (noisy) because it is not congenial for studies.

According to the annual report of the university, the authorities provided seats to 1237 male students at the 300-seat Sher-e-Bangla Hall.

There are 1200 male students at the 300-seat Abdul Latif Hall, 911 at the 420-seat Amir Ali Hall, 1000 at the 380-seat Motihar Hall, 1300 at the 430-seat Shah Mokhdum Hall, 1275 at the 836-seat Habibur Rahman Hall, 2530 at the 592-seat Suhrawardi Hall, 1401 at the 584-seat Mother Box Hall and 1375 students at the 268-seat Zia Hall.

According to sources, the University Grant Commission allocated Tk 1.5 crore last year for building another hostel for female students.

But its construction could not be started as the RU authorities used the money for payment of teachers' salary due to shortfall in budget this year, said a highly placed source.

Work on the under-construction Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Hall is also going on slowly.

The authorities expect the hall to be ready next year though it was scheduled to be completed last year.