With college authorities and private groups pitching, students can expect not to face such situations this year.
The “online noticeboard”, www.searchmycampus.com, has teams going to colleges and handing out free bottles of water along with a newsletter listing all the accommodation information outstation students could possibly need.
“Accommodation is a primary concern for students who are not from this city. We have compiled a list of various places depending on their proximity to the campus. This could help students find the right accommodation,” Vidhi Agrawal, head, marketing and sales, says. She along with two other team members has been to Hindu, SRCC, Gargi, Kamala Nehru and Lady Shri Ram College in the past two days, and will continue to alternate between the North and South campuses for a week.
The classified web portal was started by 24-year-old Peyush Bansal in December 2007, as an initiative to provide a platform for students to advertise, buy or sell services — accommodation, jobs, car pools and tuitions — and merchandise — books and laptops.
The website lists over 50 universities across 20 cities and requires an e-mail ID and contact number for registration. New features include discussion forums and an option for summer internships, where students can post their CVs.
“Students, especially freshers and those from other cities, face a lot of problems, which could be anything from course-related queries, safe housing to even issues concerning faculty. The site is trying to provide solutions so that they don’t feel alienated,” Bansal says. He left his job at Microsoft to work on his website full time, whose link is available on the Delhi University website as well.
The website’s on-campus team is also helping students and parents across colleges with small luxuries such as pens, staplers, paperclips and water. “These are very small things but a pen or a stapler can be very difficult to find during submissions,” Agrawal says.
She says she got 1,000 bottles of water on Day One: “The provision of drinking water should be the responsibility of the students’ unions. When we went to the colleges, however, there were no arrangements for drinking water.”
While Khurana managed to find a PG accommodation in Vijay Nagar after stumbling upon the website during her college festival, Chetna Pant, a second year commerce student at SRCC, said: “I wanted to borrow a book that was not available in my library. A senior from Khalsa College lent it to me after reading my post on the website,” Pant says.