Ashoka Has No Space For You

Last mid-semester break, I stayed back on campus, not least to have it to myself. To finally get a table outside libcaf, find a free treadmill, and eat at Healthy Nook without the requisite twenty minute wait. It was the emptiest I had seen campus since O-week, when it was just us first-years locked away unpacking. That week, we were impressed upon the importance of making the most of the “state-of-the-art facilities” in our time here. In speeches by the administration, candid conversations with Resident Assistants and peers—this refrain seemed to be on everyone’s lips, and understandably. Few universities in India can boast of a grand piano,  a shooting range, and one of the country’s highest price tags. Instead, I found a cutthroat, fastest-finger-first mentality that went beyond the frenzied shuttle bookings and lunchtime lines. There is a race to access even the most basic resources here and it is only going to worsen with more students. 

If Ashoka shares anything with its international counterparts, it is the chaos of course registrations. This semester was my first time going through the maelstrom, and I shudder to think of the six to follow. Collective emails were sent to professors beseeching them to increase course caps, students waited for their ‘seat available’ notification until dangerously close to the end of shopping week. Every conversation that month revolved around registrations. In 2020, an op-ed on The Edict described it as a “Hunger Games-styled scramble for seats”. While navigating the Academic Management System (AMS) is a maddening experience, the real problem with course registrations is “the increasing student numbers every year, and the lack of adequate faculty members to accommodate them”. 

While professors may agree to increased course caps, finding classrooms for these large classes is a hassle. There are limited 100-seaters—the size of most foundation and gateway courses—so classes and exams are eventually scheduled at inconvenient times. Groggy, sleep-laden students dragging themselves across the hallway even before the sun had risen were not an uncommon sight last semester. In communication with The Edict, Anamta Husain, the former Political Science department representative, explained that faculty members were encouraged to schedule introductory courses at 8:30 am because of the classroom shortage during peak class slots. Popular departments have particularly been affected by this. For instance, the midterm for the Economics Department’s Microeconomic Theory II course had to be set for 6 to 8 pm with “very little flexibility” because booking 200-seaters had become “very challenging”. Classrooms are at the core of a university, and this struggle for teaching spaces is a microcosm of the larger scarcity on campus. 

It would be remiss of me to talk about shortages without mentioning performing arts spaces on campus. You would imagine that as a department in its own right, students would be accorded practice rooms at the very least, if not operational instruments and equipment. The reality is a dingy “music room” in the basement with an assortment of musical apparatus in various states of neglect lying about, as well as a “piano room” with one piano for the entire campus. The bookings for the piano room are a spectacle: a link to a google calendar with under fifty slots that fill up in under a minute. It is managed by an undergraduate student who has undertaken the noble duty of handling the hordes Sunday evenings at 9 pm in the best case. There are many no-shows and an informal “dibs” market operating in the Whatsapp group that has a similar breakneck response time. It is, dare I say, more intimidating than course registrations, every passing second making my heart beat faster. A former piano room representative fittingly characterised getting a piano slot as the “Hunger Games” (see the parallels?). Under new regulations, every student is restricted to one slot a day, three a week, an amount any piano student would despair at, but fighting for even that meagre amount is an uphill battle. 

At the epicenter of performing arts is Black Box, Ashoka’s ever-busy theatre. Department concerts, Abhinaya and Alankar performances, The Green Room (TGR), The Comic Relief (TCR) and the increasing independent productions, not to mention all the practice—everything happens here. To manage the crowds, the latest policy mandates that every production is assigned Blackbox for a maximum of two days, one of which is the day of the show, effectively putting students under intense pressure. TCR’s former President Mahtab Kaur (UG2028) tells me she “literally had tears in [her] eyes” as she begged the Performing Arts Department Manager for practice time. Booking the space is “very unstructured,” requiring meticulous forethought and persistence not dissimilar from most things at Ashoka. Compromises and negotiations to share Black Box space get complicated: “I’ve seen a lot of fights happening because people sometimes promise time to multiple people and forget,” says Kaur. These clubs must also jostle for practice space, having to settle for small classrooms if they’re lucky, even having to “practise in the football field” when space gets tight. As an audience member, what worries me most is accommodating the increasing crowds. Every production I have attended, I have either been squashed on the uncomfortable benches, or packed into the standing mass breathing the same congested air. Lines of laptop-bearing students extend out of White Box nearly an hour before gates open. According to Kaur, while the auditorium can comfortably fit two hundred people, Thursday Night Live had a showing of over four hundred. With more students, the strain on Black Box will only grow with performers and audiences bearing the cost. 

The struggle doesn’t end when the curtain falls. For students navigating an already stressful campus life, mental health resources remain an afterthought. Ashoka Centre for Well-Being is one of the few available. The Centre commits itself to “making mental health accessible, inclusive and equitable for all”, but if a Whatsapp group is any indication of reality, this promise is severely underdelivered. Slots fill rapidly, and there are multiple requests. As an individual on the group laments, “Cannot believe healthcare is first come first serve”. When the Minister of Community Well-Being Ajitesh Vishwanath admits that there are problems with ACWB’s “extent of services,” it is beyond question that the provisions are deficient. In March, after Dr. Arvinder Singh’s departure as the Director of ACWB, the centre was brought under the control of the Dean of Student Affairs (DSA) for the first time ever, stripping it of the independence that had always defined it. In a public email regarding this, Vishwanath remarked that “the number of ACWB counsellors available for sessions [had] dropped…because many of them (if not all) have left due to personal reasons”. In early May, Nivedita Singh was appointed the Director of ACWB, and at present, there are only five counsellors on board. In private communication with The Edict, Vishwanath shared that the Student Care Office (SCO), also under the DSA, that was initially created to “provide alternate (psychiatric) mental health services ” has moved into the ACWB offices. The SCO is managed by a team that “has no formal training in mental health care” according to Vishwanath. While the YourDost therapists SCO brings in are a partial remedy, students in crisis may never reach out, wary of all the eyes on them. 

This disregard for mental health extends to physical health. The first time I rode a cycle on campus was the night before O-week began. I should have cherished it more, because that was also the last time—there were less than ten cycles for three thousand residents. The Sports Department claims to offer an “inclusive sports landscape”, but this isn’t possible when there are too few resources for everyone. They further grandstand that sports here “are not just about competition”. Competing to get one of the two pool and table tennis tables, competing to secure a treadmill or tennis court, different sports teams competing for practice space on the lawn—competition is embedded into sports at Ashoka, just not the way you’d be used to. The problem with sports shortages is two-fold. First, professional teams: The Edict has previously commented on how the women’s badminton team had their court allocation cut from three to two, leaving members with as little as “few minutes” of training time. A former team member has shared that this “really affects [their] performance in tournaments and leads to a lot of frustration”. Second, with professional teams hard-pressed for space and time, recreational players are sidelined. The Sports Department promises capability for “an athlete seeking excellence” as well as “a student simply looking to stay active”. However, with the available coaching and equipment already exhausted by the formal teams, those who simply want to play for fun have nowhere to start. 

The 2025-2029 batch has had the largest undergraduate intake so far of approximately eight hundred students. The new campus has helped offset housing challenges, but it reveals the asymmetry underlying this expansion. The only infirmary on campus is located on the main campus, despite there being two residence halls and the Trivedi School of Biosciences on the new campus. With my impending move to one of those two residence halls as a second-year, I cannot help but feel anxious about the prospect of trudging all the way to main campus in the case of an emergency. Although there is a tuck shop on the new campus, it is a cramped confectionery with overpriced non-essentials. Where is the bread and milk? The mail room and documents centre—also essentials of student life—are absent on the new campus, not to mention most classes, meetings, and dining options. Current expansion has, in effect, disproportionately inconvenienced residents of the new campus.

At the beginning of this year, former Vice-Chancellor Somak Raychaudhury announced the university’s plans to “double enrolment” and “reach a full strength of 8,000-10,000 students over the next ten years”. To do this, the campus will be expanded from 25 to 100 acres with “new departmental buildings and additional student and faculty residences”. I cannot even begin to imagine how much worse the first come first serve culture will get with this. We’ve seen already that the administration’s asymmetric ideas of expansion do not match what is needed by students living and studying here, namely an equal redistribution and expansion of classes and utilities. As a newcomer, I have little knowledge of all the inner workings of a large university, but what I know is this: regardless of future plans, we, the existing student body, need more cycles, classrooms, and care in our time here, as we were led to hope for. 

[Edited by Avika Mantri and Madiha Tariq]