Sad Hoc Student Council

Sad Hoc Student Council Sad Hoc Student Council

25/08/2026

Tiny little open letter to anyone who follows this page and is on campus as of now -

Had posted about activism for Kharagpur locals earlier here, but IIT engineers really only do things when events affect them personally - so now that IIT Delhi is protesting about suicides please use this momentum to run movements in Kharagpur as well. I was there from 2016-21. By my second year, there were 7-8 suicides in the span of a year. We had agitated, there was a huge open house. Hours and hours spent screaming at the director in TOAT, but nothing really changed.

So this time around, please organise properly if you're going to. Learn from the mistakes of batches that came before you. Please, I implore you to look and actually sit together and pinpoint issues - Kharagpur has a history of huge council meetings, they just need to be used correctly.

Please, if and when you agitate, remember to recognise that suicides are an institutional issue.

Any solution that the admin poses does not mean anything if it does not offer systemic change.

First - recognise why it is a systemic issue. IITs, and Kharagpur in particular, are an extremely isolated space. Suicides don't happen in a vaccum. You study in a very forcefully depoliticized space (politics is not just political parties btw) - what that means is that you currently study in a place that avoids gender sensitisation, caste sensitisation, class sensitisation, and minority sensitisation like the plague, implying that institutional bullying, by admin, professors, and also students, goes largely unnoticed.

Second, recognise the other dissonance that creates a depressive atmosphere - the fact that in the last 30 years, IITs have been sold as a dream guaranteed to get you employed, which doesn't really align with the fact that the systems within IITs, professors, departments, syllabuses still focus on academic excellence within a very specific departmental context. Now my personal beliefs are that educational institutions should be designed for academia and employment should largely be a natural product of that academic training. But anyway, how to resolve that dissonance, which way to take it, is something that the current student population should decide.

My only request is, do remember that you do do politics every day in Kharagpur when you choose to involve yourself in any club, society, hall politics, placement committees or any social spaces really. So Kharagpur definitely is capable of large scale useful agitation, just plan properly, and this time around, please refuse to back down before changes are actually implemented.

- from a frustrated alumnus

29/07/2026

The alumni sad hoc student council noticed somewhere that the Prembazar gate has been closed to thoroughfare since the pandemic - citing security reasons (?). The council applauds the administration for saving kharagpur residents from the sight of apolitical engineering students.

So anyway, satire out of the way - let's actually talk about what that means. Most of you guys here must be alumni - you recognise how movement worked inside the campus. Aside from being ours - the campus has historically been for the people of Kharagpur as well. It is a 2200 acre campus right in the middle of an existing town - without access to the campus premises, the locals there lose access to quick movement across their own town, quick access to a thriving campus market, quick access to campus pharmacies and hospitals, etc. All of us have lived alongside the locals of Kharagpur, during our years there, utilising the campus space when needed.

Now why this is necessary - Kharagpur came up in the 1950s in an already thriving town. Do you think a campus as huge as that can function without the consent of the people who live there? Allowing thoroughfare, allowing complete and quick access to the public and government amenities existing inside the campus like the police station, market, hospital, etc, was necessary so that the campus coming up would not disrupt local life. Administrations prior to this have respected this. Heavily restricted access to public and government amenities is not what the locals there signed up for when their town was chosen for a government university campus.

21/07/2026

In light of the recent events in Delhi, the council has decided to very periodically take back this mantle, in order to remind Kharagpur and IIT folks that everything is political, your campuses cannot be apolitical, and if you do not rise up against the government, against the administration, and against the system right now, you will soon lose any of your remaining rights.
Engineers and engineering students at IITs have been some of the worst "apolitical" groups in existence. The politics has finally reached your doorstep, step out and grab it by it's neck. And I just hope that this finally makes you political enough to see beyond yourself and protest with empathy for things other than education too - the state has brutalized it's citizens for way way too long.
Really is the time to wake up.
Inquilab Zindabad.

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