The Issue

IIT Hyderabad's official website lists 8 hostel blocks for girls (Aryabhatta, Bhaskara, Maitreyi, Gargi, Kalpana Chawla, Anandi, Sarojini Naidu, and Kapila). In practice, this number does not reflect the accommodation actually available to female students today. Bhaskara, one of the listed girls' blocks, was converted for boys' use in the recent years, as a result, female students are facing serious, ongoing accommodation problems:

• Overcrowding: Students are being placed in triple-sharing rooms at the Kapila block, a space that was not designed to comfortably fit three occupants while at the same time, a boys' block (Bhabha) sits mostly empty and is reportedly being used for temporary rentals.

• Unequal treatment in room allocation:  While male students are able to choose their hostel pods and rooms, female students are often allocated rooms away from their friends and batchmates, with little to no say in the process. In several cases, this has left students isolated from the peer groups they would otherwise be housed with, undermining the sense of community that hostel life is meant to provide. 

• Dismissive response from the hostel office: Students who have raised these concerns describe being met with a repeated, unexplained line "girls ka accommodation issue hai", rather than any real acknowledgment or resolution of the problem, along with harsh or dismissive treatment when pursuing it further.

• Impact on student wellbeing: The manner in which concerns are dismissed has, in some cases, gone beyond inconvenience. In one instance, a student had to reach out to the Sunshine Club (the institute's mental health support group) simply to feel heard and understood, after being dismissed by hostel staff despite having medical records of chicken pox. No student should have to seek mental health support just to have basic concerns acknowledged. 

These are not isolated complaints. The pattern: fewer functional blocks for women, no input into room allocation, overcrowding, and a dismissive institutional response, points to a systemic gap in how the institute is managing accommodation for its female students.

Hostel life is a core part of the college experience, it is a place to build community, independence, and belonging. No student should have to fight just to not be isolated from their peers. IIT Hyderabad is an institution that many young women work incredibly hard to get into, often seeing it as a path toward opportunity and empowerment. Facing systemic disadvantage in something as basic as adequate housing undermines that promise and risks discouraging future students, interns, and staff from choosing this institute at all.

1. Restore adequate, dedicated capacity for female students, including reconsidering the use of underutilized blocks such as Bhabha, so that no student is placed in unsuitable overcrowded arrangements like triple-sharing in spaces meant for fewer occupants.
2. Establish a fair, transparent room/block allocation process for female students, comparable to what is currently available to male students.
3. Set up a clear, accountable grievance redressal process specifically for hostel accommodation issues, with defined response timelines and protection from dismissive or disrespectful treatment by hostel staff.
4. Communicate proactively with affected students about any reallocation, rather than students learning about changes to their accommodation after the fact.

Why Your Signature Matters

This petition will be shared with the Director's office to demonstrate that this is not a handful of isolated complaints, but a shared concern across the student community. The more signatures we gather, the harder this is to dismiss.