Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute (VJTI) at Matunga, is one of the oldest engineering colleges’ of Mumabi. It is a 127 year old building that hasn’t been revamped in almost half a decade. Last week, there was an accident in VJTI wherein, a ceiling collapsed in one of the classrooms of Mechanical Engineering department. Luckily, no lecture was being conducted in the classroom at that time; hence there were no injuries/fatalities. However, VJTI students and professors haven’t given much air to the accident.
The VJTI campus consists of 2 buildings; the main structure which is 127 years old and the OR A new structure which was built only 50 years ago. Most of the lecture halls and laboratories are housed in the old building which is well ventilated. However, even the deans’ offices in the old building don’t have air conditioning facilities and are as small as a corner street shop. O.G. Kakde, Director of VJTI says, “We recently renovated the girls’ hostel buildings, and labs are under timely maintenance. The classroom where the incident occurred was not in regular use. As for dean offices, we have released tenders to restore the structures and install ACs wherever required.” Besides, students aren’t very wary about such an incident happening in future. “This is very rare and unexpected. The buildings are old but not in a dilapidated state,” says Neel Chabbra, a fourth year mechanical engineering student.
Students haven’t been very concerned about the state of the building. “The authorities say they are working on proposals to revamp the institute but the processing is very slowly,” says Neel. “ACs are available in select rooms like the Computer Science laboratories and the Placement offices,” he added. Another fourth year student, Saifuddin Hitawala, from the Department of Computer Science said, “There are occasions where even fans and lights stop working, although we are not sure if it is due to machinery issues or faulty electrical lines. Until last year, our labs had obsolete computers with RAM as low as 256 MB, but they have been upgraded this year.”