Students in the premier North Eastern Hill University (NEHU) in Meghalaya Saturday accused their vice chancellor AN Rai of asking them \u201cto live on biscuits\u201d in the wake of the week-long power failure. The university, one of India\u2019s premier central universities, has been without power from Aug 19 affecting thousands of students and faculty members residing in the sprawling campus.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Vice Chancellor asked us to live on biscuits as there is shortage of drinking water for cooking purposes in the hostels,\u201d one of the students claimed. The drinking water in the University is pumped and without power there has been acute shortage of water for drinking, cooking and other day to day usages.<\/p>\n
However, Rai rubbished the students\u2019 allegation. \u201cI have never said students should live on biscuits\u2026 these are all rumours. Instead, we are trying our best to restore power. Moreover we have hired generators to pump water,\u201d the vice chancellor said. On Friday night, hundreds of students marched to the Vice Chancellor\u2019s residence with candles, gheraoed it and shouted slogans till 11 pm in the night demanding immediate restoration of power and water.The power crisis is due to the failure of the two 3 MVA transformers in the complex. In fact, the standby transformer was out of order from December last year, but was not repaired. <\/p>\n
The university\u2019s administration is being blamed for it, with teachers and students saying, the Vice Chancellor tried to cut maintenance cost and the transformers were therefore never given due care. \u201cThis crisis will seriously affect research in natural science and engineering subjects wherein some department\u2019s samples for experiments and chemicals need to be kept at minus 20 degrees,\u201d Apurba Kumar Baruah, chairman NEHU Campus Welfare Committee and head of political science department, said. He added: \u201cThis loss and its impact on the university are yet to be assessed. It should be noted that a crisis of this nature is unprecedented in the history of any central universities of this country.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the university\u2019s administration made some failed attempts to restore power. First, it tried to repair the transformers with engineers from Guwahati. The engineers said it would take at least 45 days to repair the transformers. Then, it bought a 1 MVA transformer from Guwahati at Rs. 16 lakh, which went broken within hours after it operation as it got overheated taking the entire load of the complex.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are trying to get power from the State electricity board, however, due to some technical problem power has not been restored so far,\u201d Rai said Meanwhile, Rai has ordered an independent inquiry to probe into the power crisis. The university is calling a meeting of its highest decision making body, the executive council Monday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Students in the premier North Eastern Hill University (NEHU) in Meghalaya Saturday accused their vice chancellor AN Rai of asking them \u201cto live on biscuits\u201d in the wake of the week-long power failure. The university, one of India\u2019s premier central universities, has been without power from Aug 19 affecting thousands of students and faculty members […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[679],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-137447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nagaland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137447\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}