The New Women’s’ College is still awaiting a permanent accommodation for its students despite being setup nine years ago by the J&K government here.

The college was sanctioned in 2008 under Prime Minister’s Reconstruction Plan (PMRP) however, the students are yet to take classes in the permanent building.

Officials said the college has an enrollment of around 700 students and is functioning on make shift arrangements from two buildings of Amar Singh (AS) College, Srinagar.

“Apart from the class rooms the college has no other facets to be called as an institution for Higher Education. Other colleges are spread over 100 kanals of land but this college is confined to two buildings,” the official said.

The officials in Higher Education Department (HeD) said there was a delay in land identification by the government which caused delay in construction of a permanent structure.

“The execution of work faced several hiccups for one or the other issues,” the official said.

As per the official documents, the project cost of the College is Rs. 11.48 Cr out of which Rs 6.34 crore including 1.44 crore from state share has been released to the construction agency.

“GoI released Rs 4.90 crore as centre share and rest of the cost will be released by state government,” the official documents state.

Meanwhile, the officials said government had initially identified 80 kanals of land in the campus of Bemina Government Degree College (GDC).

“The land was identified out of 380 kanals of land in GDC Bemina, but the decision was dropped later,” the official said.

Presently, the construction of building is going on at Zakura area on custodian land measuring around 54.13 kanals, purchased at Rs 9.98 crore from the custodian department.

The officials said earlier, the government had identified some land at Tengpora but the land was not feasible for construction.

“It took almost four years for the department to identify the land for the permanent campus of the college,” the official said.

Despite the passage of over four years, the government is yet to complete the construction and setup a permanent campus for the students enrolled in the college.

“The construction work on the college building was stopped soon after it was executed by the construction agency. HED was not allowed to construct college at residential land and the issue landed in LAWDA,” the official said.

“Later, the LAWDA authorities withheld NoC for a prolonged period of time which caused further delay to start the construction work,” he said.

The official said there were some confrontation faced by the department and later the issue was discussed in cabinet.

 “Construction was started on the college building after HeD got permission by the state cabinet,” the official said.

At present the first phase of construction is completed up to the slab level of ground floor.

“It is a double story building of composite structure type,” the official added.

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