BANGALORE: Faced by an acute space crunch, 1,195 students attached to six SC/ST/OBC hostels in the State are forced to stay in rented houses. In most hostels that do provide the bare minimum, 13 to 15 students have to share space in a single room. A hostel with 360 students in Bagepalli has no toilet.

Twenty-five to 300 students stand in queue to use a single bathroom in another hostel, while 20 to 53 girl students have to make do with one toilet.

These facts were brought to light in an Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishath (ABVP) survey of 170 of the State's 265 SC/ST/OBC hostels. While most hostels lacked even the basic infrastructure such as rooms, the survey found that the State Government was yet to put to use the 75 hostel rooms built in Bangalore.

Six hostels in the State had no toilets and five had no bathrooms. A hostel with 50 students in Rajanagara had no bathroom while another with 100 students in Tumkur had nothing called a toilet or a bathroom. About 100 students at a Chamarajnagar hostel had only one bathroom.

The study discovered that hostels in Chamarajnagar, Shahapur, Bagepalli, Tumkur, Siddlaghatta, Alanda, Raichur, Humnabad, Udupi, Hebri, Bannanji, Chitradurga, Gundlupet, Hemagal, Haveri, Bhadravati, Sedam, Yadgir, Ranibennur, Bidar, Kolar and Mysore deserved immediate attention.

The Kapu students' hostel in Udupi was one of the worst. The grossly inadequate bathrooms and toilets had no doors, the study observed. More than 50 hostels had become "cattlesheds."

One hostel in Bangalore had two rooms for 80 students while another in Shahapur had just three rooms for 100 students.

Breakfast was not served in 12 hostels and one hostel did not have a midday meal either.

None of the 12 hostels had anything called special food, common in many hostels at least once a week.

Presenting the report to presspersons, ABVP State organising secretary N. Ravikumar said the survey findings had already been intimated to the Government.

The Parishath wanted the Social Welfare Department and the Minister concerned to address the pressing issues of the hostels, including the quality of food served, lack of bathrooms and toilets, and cleanliness of the existing infrastructure.

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