LAHORE:
Some 60 people including Mayo Hospital doctors and King Edward Medical University (KEMU) MBBS students living in the Broom Hostel have been asked to vacate their rooms so that girl students displaced by demolition of a hostel can be shifted there.
A KEMU official said The Express Tribune a girl hostel adjacent to KEMU building had to be demolished and built again. He said the girls had to be shifted to another location for sometime.
Doctors, however, have refused to vacate their premises.
Dr Naseer, one of the Mayo Hospital doctors living in Broom Hostel, said. “We have paid for a full year for our rooms. Legally, they cannot ask us to vacate our rooms in the middle of the year.”
“In any case, there are boys living in all other blocks of the hostel and there isn’t no separation between blocks,” he said.
He said the administration had given them verbal orders to vacate their rooms and they expected to receive notices.
He said, “If we vacate our rooms on the administration’s request then we will be ‘adjusted’ in already allotted rooms so that four or five doctors will be living in a room meant for one doctor or two students,” he said.
A student living in the hostel speaking on the condition of anonymity said, “Our professional examinations are near. If we are asked to shift in the middle of the examinations or before the exams, it will waste our time and might yield a poor result for us. This is the wrong time to do so.”
“If this is unavoidable [to the construct the new girls’ hostel], it should be started when exams are not near.”
A senior professor in the KEMU faculty on the condition of anonymity told The Tribune, “The issue was brought up in the Academic Council meeting and almost all the senior professors opposed it. However, the vice-chancellor was of the view that the old girls hostel should be demolished to construct a new one.”
“We raised the concern that there was a security issue if the girls had to live in a boys’ hostel…and at considerable distance from the university campus.”
“The girl students could be accommodated at the Shahbaz Research Centre which is unoccupied,” he added.
“Female students do not want accommodation at the boys’ hostel. Several have written applications and submitted them to their wardens but to no avail,” a female MBBS student said on the condition of anonymity.
The KEMU acting VC Dr Asad Ashraf and implementation committee head Professor Syed Awais were not available for comment.
Published in The Express Tribune, November 10th, 2012.
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