Students of the State-run hostels in Prakasam district are an unenviable lot, pursuing education with inadequate facilities in their hostels.
Bathing is a luxury for the tribal students of the ST Welfare Hostel at Balajinagar here which lacks even a bathroom, complain a group of students at the hostel. They are in a position to take bath only once in three days as the hostel gets water supply thrice a week.
They store water in drums and use it sparingly to meet all their needs, including cooking, they add in a conversation with The Hindu .
''We thought the statutory backing given to the SC/ST sub-plans meant an end to diversion of funds and better facilities for us. But the ground reality shows that the situation has not changed for the better,” laments Students Federation of India Prakasam district president Ch. Sudhakar.
With only two functional toilets, 114 girls vie with one another to use it and rush to their school in time in a State-run hostel in Darsi, the home constituency of Environment Minister Sidda Raghava Rao.
“Thanks to the alleged indifference of the authorities, eight toilets in the hostel remain in disuse,” he says after a survey of the hostels in the district.
Nodal agency
The condition of the 184 SC, ST and BC hostels, which accommodate 15,000 students, is no different as they lack adequate basic amenities, Sudhakar says while calling for a separate nodal agency for the utilisation of Sub-Plan funds in a proper manner.
At a time when 49 mandals were hit by fluoride problem, the students are forced to drink unprotected water, he complains.
The quality of the food served in these hostels is also poor, he remarks and demands that the mess charges be increased to ₹1,500 for school students and ₹2,000 for college students taking into account the skyrocketing prices of essential commodities.
