Getting a lift may not be everybody’s preference. On top of that, when one has to hitchhike at 10 pm to get back home, it can be very painstaking. Students at IIT Indore are staying in a temporary residential campus, Silver Springs Township, 15 km away from the city, which has a well-developed residential campus with a club house, independent hostel and a fine infrastructure, but lacks good transportation facilities. There is no direct public transport available from the residential campus to the city as well.
IIT Indore has a fleet of 18 buses which help students in commuting daily from hostels to the institute but provides transportation to the city only on holidays. The nearest bus stand is Tejaji Nagar, which is about 4 km away from Silver Springs. Students can also hire a taxi or an auto-rickshaw to travel from
The timing for the first lecture, breakfast and first bus are not aligned it seems. Taking the first bus from the hostel to attend the first lecture of the morning would mean missing breakfast, or vice-versa. Every morning, the IIT Indore students who prefer breakfast take lifts to reach their academic campus (PACL) from the hostel. Their bags acts as their identity cards, which helps everyday travellers know that they are IIT Indore students. A student, who wished to remain anonymous, mentioned, “I take a lift every morning to reach PACL. Now, even the frequent passersby recognise me. Getting a lift from PACL to the hostel is difficult. Sometimes, we have to wait for 1:30 – 2 hours for the institute bus.”
A final year student at IIT Indore talked about one of the few times he hitchhiked home. “I was returning to the hostel at 9:30 pm. I had to take a lift from Tejaji Nagar, so I asked a passer-by to drop me till the hostel. He refused and left, citing that a murder had taken place on the same street the day before. I only remember being dreadfully scared and running back to the hostel.”
“There are no direct public transportation facilities available for IIT Indore’s Simrol and Silver Springs campuses. But the Indore Municipal Corporation has proposed a plan to start the service soon. The institute does provide transportation when students go on authorized outings,” said one of the professors teaching at the institute.
IIT Indore students are not allowed to own personal vehicles other than bicycles inside the campus. Public transport facilities are available but not frequent enough from IIT Indore’s academic campus, PACL. But the distance between PACL and Silver Springs is 20 km compared to the 15 km distance between Indore’s city area and the Silver Springs Township. For students, travelling in trucks, riding on motorcycles with strangers, and clicking selfies in pick-up trucks is a way of enjoyment. However, it is not the same for these students’ parents. Though no accidents have been reported, all this adds up to the parents’ worries of their wards commuting in an unsafe manner.