Hyderabad: Efforts to contain the coronavirus outbreak are being felt by the city’s university students and IT professionals who reside in hostels. Besides university students who live in on-campus dorms, many IT professionals reside in dormitories around the city. Organisations like Telangana Hub, are letting employees work from home to curb the coronavirus’ effects on operations. However, with hostels asking occupants to vacate their rooms on short notice, panic has set in among the students and IT workers alike.
“Three colleagues from my team are directly affected. Their hostels, located in SR Nagar, were forcefully evicting them. I approached the city’s Commissioner of Police to look further into the matter,” said RJS, an employee for an IT company.
With many students and IT professionals being asked to vacate their accommodations, they are left homeless. The latter have been given only 24 hours to leave their rooms whereas students from Maulana Azad Urdu University have been more time.
Citing the government’s and police’s orders to do so, hostels in other localities like Ameerpet and Kukatpally are evacuating their facilities. People from the IT corridor are not only bereft of a home to work from, but one which they can reside in.
With this panic setting in among hostel-dwellers, a couple of IT workers made frantic calls to their superiors on Wednesday morning notifying them of their dorm owner’s demands to vacate their premises amidst the COVID-19 outbreak.
The owner of Gayatri Hostels, Maithrivanam, talks about her counterparts in other cities and the actions being taken by law enforcement officials. She says, “The news is filled with stories of other dormitory owners evicting people and the authorities ensuring that they do so.”
However, the police also told her not to send away women occupants.
“Although there is still no clarity regarding male employees,” she adds.
Krishna Yedula, a member of the core committee on Coronavirus Advisory for the IT sector claimed that the Telangana DGP and Principal Secretary of IT, Jayesh Ranjan, have been appraised of the situation.
An advisory, which states that hostels for working professionals cannot be shut down, has been issued.