As colleges across the board come under scrutiny for subpar food quality, even esteemed institutions like IIIT are not immune to such issues, as recently, a social media post has alleged, that students are being served meals in a mess where cockroaches and flies are visibly present.
Highlighting this issue, IIIT Hyderabad’s former undergraduate researcher, Shashwat Goel, recalled the ordeal in a series of post at X.
In one of the notes, He claimed, that students are forced to tolerate unhygienic college mess, where presence of cockroaches and flies in food and lack of handwash are adjusted with for years.
He also shared an image, where salads were covered with flies. As a result, the post has received over 330K views.
Students are forced to subscribe to the college ‘mess’ (apt word). Cockroaches in food, flies, lack of handwash etc. are just meant to be ignored, since years. The fact that there’s less food than oil is somehow not even a major concern. Student complaints are ignored. pic.twitter.com/Jdi03yjHTV
— Shashwat Goel (@ShashwatGoel7) June 6, 2024
He further alleged, that whenever someone complained of this issue, they often blamed students for ordering food from food delivery apps.
Talking about ordering food, he angrily said, ‘When students report sickness, hostel and health authorities blame it on food orders from Swiggy Zomato, which frankly are much safer. It’s so useless that students have given up and stopped even trying to report. Claiming plausible deniability is unfortunately a trend’.
Not calling it one-off incident, Shashwat Goel revealed, that in previous year, around 40 students got typhoid due to polluted water within hostel premises.
Moreover, he also added, ‘the boys’ hostel warden intimidated students from getting tested, actively spreading false information about symptoms, worsening things.’
He further claimed that the issue became public when high school students from Olympiad Panini High School fell ill and were hospitalized after consuming only hostel food, but the institution hid this incident from the student body.
Luckily, this cover blew apart recently when @OlympiadPanini high-school students got severely sick and hospitalised, and they weren’t ordering food. The worst part is, the college hid this from the rest of the student body, leading to dozens of avoidable sick students.
— Shashwat Goel (@ShashwatGoel7) June 6, 2024
Later responding to Goel’s tweet, one student from IIT Delhi corroborated this incident saying
‘As an IIT Delhi graduate, I’ve seen firsthand how our so-called “top” institutions are failing students. The issues at IIIT Hyderabad are just the tip of the iceberg. It’s time to expose the rot within our IIT system.’
So far, there is no response from institution.
