Q: Let’s start with why you are contesting for VP and how your experience at KGP affected that.
My motivation to contest for the post of Vice President, at TSG comes from a growing feeling of gratitude towards the institute. Because of all the opportunities I’ve gained from the institute and over the past three years,, I’ve realised that the Technology Students’ Gymkhana is the heart of student activity and the heart of all the development that the students have gained. My experiences throughout this institute have been as a coordinator at the International Cell, sub-editor at Awaaz, head of Alumni affairs in the finance club, growth head of IIT Tech Ambit (a startup under SRIC) and senior member at ShARE. These are the positions of responsibility that I’m currently holding. Before that, I was also part of the Spring Fest.
These experiences have given me broad exposure to different organisations and administrative structures in the institute. For example, working in IIT Tech Ambit, I experienced how a startup works under SRIC, all the approval it needs, and the working procedure and its restrictions.
Working in ShARE, wasn’t an associated body with the institution, but working on a global scale and representing IIT Kharagpur was a different experience. Working in the International Relations Cell provided me with the experience of a cell and the learnings that come with it, of the hard work and dedication we put into all the initiatives and programmes we have working under the Dean of Outreach and Alumni Affairs.
These are my motivations, and I believe I’m a suitable candidate for this post because of my broad experience. And my positions of responsibility have been a testament to my dedication, hard work and my perseverance..
Q: What do you believe distinguishes you from the two other candidates? What makes you better or at least different from them?
I can’t comment on the other candidates but considering only my strengths, I have a very diverse background, working in different organisations, cells and clubs in the institute. I was also a volunteer in the 2021–22 Convocation. I’ve seen how things work at the ground level. I was also a Design Team member at Inter IIT Tech Meet 11.0 in the IIT Kharagpur contingent. I’ve seen how the Inter IIT preparation works and what all goes into it. Apart from that, my experiences shaped me as a person that I can understand problems. I’ve good presentation skills in terms of what I’m thinking. I can put things in a way that people can understand and have a healthy discussion on it. These are some things I believe are my strengths. Apart from that, my upbringing has been very humble. My parents were doctors, working day-night and late-night shifts. They have instilled in me the values of selflessness and dedication and these are some things I strive by till today.
Q: Coming to your proposals, there are a lot of issues on campus, so how did you decide what to include in your proposals and what to leave out?
An ideal proposal for a VP should be something that covers every single student, is impactful, and is something that a vice president can do, something feasible and not something that is way too big of a shot and not feasible in real life. My search for proposals that I believed would be really impactful for the students and feasible started in January. I talked to a lot of stakeholders involved, from various committees, administrative officials, and members of academic staff. There were a lot of problems that I found and created solutions to, but working on them later, doing groundwork and talking to administrative officials, I narrowed it down to the five proposals that I have right now. I did extensive groundwork on these and believed them to be really feasible in my academic tenure.
Q: You would have spoken to Brahmjot. What is something you’re most excited to work on right now? Something that he’s currently working on or probably won’t be able to finish in his tenure, and you’ll have to pick up from it. Can you mention a couple of those things that you’d be interested in working on?
During the academic session of 2021–22, there was this proposal of Apna Insti. This app came out in this academic session itself. Currently, it’s a very static application, but the boundaries are limitless. This is something we’ll expand on, having all the societies’ notice boards, having a dynamic approach to it that every society has a small section on it. It will be like a hub for all the students and a daily go-to application for each and every one of them. This has a lot of scopes that could be worked on.
Secondly, there are many infrastructure projects currently going on. The Food Court near Tikka is something I’m looking forward to in my academic session, the approach taken by the student representatives and administrative stakeholders, what it could be for the students and the opportunities it will bring for the students.
Q: You mentioned the Food Court near Tikka. So what are the problems faced by this project, why is it not working, and there’s basically nothing there as of now?
Currently, the construction is still going on. There are a lot of wirings and toiletries that need to be filled in. After that, it will be handed over and leased out by the commercial establishment and licensing committee. Once it is leased out and the tender is put out there, we will talk to ten private contractors that we have and want to reach out to, or else they will reach out to the committee, and it will be there, and it will be functioning in a while.
Q: Back to Apna Insti, does TSG plan on shifting the hub of student activity from, say, Facebook or even Instagram nowadays to this app?
There’s no exact framework that I believe the TSG is following right now, but they want to replicate all the outsourcing we have and the outreach we do from social media or word of mouth and replicate it to ApnaInsti. With a lot of features like Google Forms in-built, so students can sign up from there, they can receive a lot more information there than relying on social media, which may get lost in the chaos and clutter.
Q: The next few questions of mine are going to be situation based. This year, quite a few students have been caught with intoxicants and illegal substances. What do you think is going on with that?
I contacted the Senior Secretary Officer regarding this and he told me that we are towards a transition phase, from online to offline semesters and dealing with the ripples that come with it. These may be some of the issues that arise from that. It is also not just the students. According to the rules and regulations, students don’t consume these substances, but if they do, the student representatives are there to reach out to them and help them out of this situation.
Q. As much as you are aware of, are there any initiatives that current student representatives of TSG as a whole have taken to combat this?
I don’t recall any specific initiative that was taken towards this. But in general, the student representative and administrative bodies are working towards a wholesome institute community, organising campaigns, even Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property & Law is currently organising an event on 2nd April in the afternoon. So these are the small initiatives taken by various bodies in the institute to help create a wholesome institute.
Q. Previous year, there have been a lot of issues with water, electricity, wifi and it was not the case with the previous academic session; it has just been the past two semesters, and it has been especially pronounced in halls like Azad and MMM, there were a lot of issues with water and electricity, so why do you think it is suddenly the case and what you would do in your tenure to fix this if you were elected?
So evaluating the situation right now, in this academic session, there have been a lot of problems with basic facilities that a student gets and there have been disruptions in the internet accessibility that we have and disruptions in the water supply that we currently get. There have been disruptions, though not that much, but few in the electricity right now. These all come down to the proper facilities that are there in place and restructuring of them. So, if you read out the vision of Dr Virendra Kumar Tewari, when he was given the position of director of the institute, in his vision there was an approach that in his academic tenure he will be changing and creating a new water supply from the nearby lake and am not sure which water body it is, but we are currently working on restructuring our water supply initiative and on the second hand, We are also working towards a greener approach by having a private contractor taking care of waste management. so these are the structural changes that we are making on the ground level. If elected as a Vice President of Technology Student Gymkhana I’ll be looking into all of the problems that are there and what I can do as a student representative and what new innovative ideas I can bring out or what student help can I gather to solve these issues. I’ll try to do whatever there’s in my capabilities and my responsibilities enrolled to carve out these issues.
Q. You might be aware of the latest placement season, so what are your comments about the placement numbers?
Talking about the placement phase for the academic session 2022–23, the numbers were astounding and it was greater than the last year but there has been dissatisfaction in the student community regarding the opportunities they were getting. It also resonated with post-graduate and research scholar students. As we all know there was a season of recession during the placement, this might have been a problematic issue but still, I would like to thank the placement committee members for pulling it off and even providing the opportunities we are very grateful for it but as I’ve stated in one of my proposals, I want to change the structure and add new post graduate and research scholar representative in placement committee member. I’ve done the groundwork and what increase in the fees it would have for these new placement committee members. Moving on to the second part of the proposal is having a revamped career development centre portal. Currently, it is distributed into two websites, one is the student site for applying for the forms and checking up the notice board, and the second is for the company as a point of contact for any organisation where he/she wants to contact the institute. They come on the CDC website. The problem pertains to the fact that it is not that structured, and there is a lot of scope of improvement. So, what I’m proposing is to have a unified website/portal that’ll allow more transparency and more ease of use for all the students and all the stakeholders involved in the process, increasing the efficiency of this process.
Q. Following up on the placement question, instead of focusing only on placement, talking about internships, the CV building portal of ERP is not as user-friendly and randomly deletes and adds stuff which has been an issue for a long time. MFTP is not accurate and misses a lot of notices that come on the CDC notice board. You spoke about a unified portal. How do you combat these issues? This can directly be fixed on ERP itself, using better codes; if it has not already been done on ERP, how would you do it on your own website?
So currently the problem pertains to the curriculum-vitae section when you press save, it does not save and vanishes each and every content you put in. When I tried to find the root of the problem, it was regarding the servers and database structure that the current enterprise resource planning section of our institute uses. So we have these two servers where the data is stored and the oscillation between the two servers and accessing it is the problem we have. The enterprise resource planning officials I had a conversation with are working on testing new methods to solve that problem that pertains. Secondly, coming to the user experience in the user interface we have for the current curriculum vitae structure, and how we create it, this is something that could be fixed but is still being worked upon, but in the new portal that I am proposing, it will be very user friendly and accessible according to the current model standards. As we have seen the structure that is there in IIT Bombay and madras, I am proposing a similar structure as they have, that is a unified platform with more transparency and more user-friendliness. This is a major problem I will surely work on to make it as friendly as possible because there are a lot of students in this institute and if a server is not able to handle it,this problem shouldn’t pertain over a long time. I believe the officials are currently working on it. Currently, the MFTP is not working, the only source of notification we have is whatever there ison the ERP notice board. When I started working on this problem in February itself, I found out there is an application that ERP has and it has not yet been published I talked to the office regarding the scope of using this as a CDC notice board, sending notification in a private mode that only could be accessed once you log in with the same security features that ERP has. So this would remove all the concerns that the administration has regarding content privacy. It will make sure that the students are having easier accessibility to all the notices, and the timeline that I received officially at erp office was around 2 months.
Q. You said it’ll have the same amount of security as ERP, so why would someone not just log in to ERP, if you still have to keep logging in every time to check a notice?
With the new system in place, you’ll get personalised notification from the companies you’ve applied for or the companies that are of your interest. And once you receive a notification, you would be aware there’s something new on the notice board. So that is where the ease of access comes in, the notice would not be visible on the lock screen or notification panel, once you login you would be able to access it, the main thing is the information that there’s something new that the student could access that is currently not available because MFTP is not working. So, in your notification block you will get the fact that you have a new notification and you can go and check it.
Q: This year, we saw a lot of accommodation issues, such as 4 to 5 students living in triple sharing rooms. So how do you think the incoming batch of freshers will be accommodated?
A: I cannot comment exactly about this or predict the future but I believe the institution is taking steps to address the accommodation issues. There are two new halls being constructed currently in the south of the campus which have an increased capacity as per the annual report two years back. Them changing the plan and increasing the capacity shows they are working towards accommodating the new students in the upcoming session.
Q: Are the two new halls expected to be constructed by the time the next freshers arrive?
A: The schedule for the construction isn’t very transparent to me right now based on my groundwork. But I believe the institute will take care of this and as the student representative, if elected, I will try my best to know what what the best solution is and the best accommodation structure will be for the students coming. And we as the students’ committee and the members of the academic staff and the institute officials will be looking out for the students and providing them with all the facilities. Currently, all the facilities are there but they are not up to the mark. And on a daily basis, the institute is trying to take leaps in this domain.
Q. What initiatives would you take for the mental well-being of the entire student body if elected?
If elected as a VP TSG, there could be a lot of scope for increasing the mental well-being, one of my proposals contains making changes in the current counselling centre, making it more accessible for the students. Currently, the structure is such that if someone is not mentally well reaches out to the counselling centre. But it should not be just restricted to all those because of the stigma it has around it. I believe the counsellors are also interested in making it more approachable for a lot of students. In general, counselling can be just for day to day needs, how can you have a better sleep schedule, how to think more positively, how can you work more efficiently, these are small things students could be benefited from, and this stigma around it would banish once students start approaching it for day to day problems where they want to seek help. I believe the counselling centre is very well equipped and has been working efficiently, reaching out to students, helping them. In this new approach, it’ll allow more students to reach out and reduce the stigma. Adding student representatives in student connection with the counselling centre will allow it to be more accessible. In one of the sub-part of my proposal, I am proposing gatekeeper’s training for the students which would be a major leap towards ensuring mental wellness and wholesome community development. As the students will be equipped to help each other out and they would have a better understanding of all the situations.
Q. Do you think it is feasible for the counsellors to reach out to students on weekly basis, especially the entire student body to check up on them, given there are just 7 full time counsellors and 2 part-time counsellors?
The current number of counsellors is very skewed with the ratio of students that we have but they have been working efficiently and the progress that I have seen of the students and my friends reaching out to the counselling centre, they have been getting appropriate treatment, but we could have increase in the number and it has been increasing in past few years. Moving up ahead, at this current scenario the counsellors could not reach out to the student community on a weekly basis. But with the addition of student representatives and student association with the counselling centre, people allow the word to be spread much better, small initiatives taken by the counselling centre in accordance with the students need with the help of the students. That will allow generating a better scenario for all these activities that the counselling centre wants to do.
Q. Along with the general stigma around the counselling centre, there are also rumours about the counselling centre not keeping the information private, it has been known in some cases to share your information with the Dean of Student Affairs or some higher officials. What is your comment on that and if that is the case, is there something that can be done about it?
On the first page of the counselling centre website, it is mentioned what are the procedures and outlooks they have on keeping students’ information private, the counsellors only reach out to the administrative stakeholders when it is really necessary for them to take an action or to know what the problem pertains in the students’ life. Reaching out to the administration on this side has been good, as the administrative section has been able to take measures that eases out a students’ life as in terms of the academic load. Secondly, it is a better way of communicating reaching out to their parents through this channel, there could be more student representation not in privacy, but helping out disseminating the information regarding the initiatives and awareness as they are not directly in touch with any of the students.
Conclusion: I’ll like to thank you all for asking such innovative and tinkering questions and talking about the current scenarios. I believe the institute and the student community is on a very good approach of coming back from an online to offline semester. This year has been a very good mix of a hybrid semester and all the opportunities that pertain. For my batch of students and the coming batch of students, there are a lot of changes in the institute, there has been a lot of shift towards different opportunities. If elected as a VP, I would ensure that each and every student is able to utilise all the opportunities that are there and create new opportunities for the students and impact them in a wholesome way.