A growing trend has become visible across Panjab University, with student leaders increasingly turning to social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook to project campus developments as achievements of their own campaigns.Through reels, videos, posters and posts, infrastructure works, administrative decisions and even long-pending proposals are being showcased as outcomes of protests, memorandums or meetings with university authorities. While student representatives routinely pursue issues affecting students, several of the developments now being highlighted online were already under consideration, sanctioned years earlier, or fall outside the university’s administrative jurisdiction.The latest example concerns the repair of the approach road leading to the parking area outside the University Institute of Legal Studies (UILS), an issue that had remained pending for months. UILS student leader Gurnoor Kanda recently credited the repair work to his six-day hunger strike, during which restoration of the damaged road was among the demands placed before the university administration. Almost simultaneously, Panjab University Campus Students Council (PUCSC) vice-president Ashmeet Singh also projected the same work as an outcome of his efforts, stating that he had repeatedly taken up the matter through memorandums submitted to the vice-chancellor, the construction office and the UILS director.The road repair is not the only development to have multiple claimants. Earlier this year, Ashmeet highlighted the university’s ongoing accessibility upgradation for persons with disabilities as one of the council’s achievements. However, university records show that the works are being executed under the Centre-funded scheme for Implementation of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act (SIPDA), a project worth around Rs 54 crore. As part of this project, an external agency conducted an accessibility audit of the campus in Dec 2023, much before the present student council assumed office.PUCSC president Gaurav Veer Sohal, representing ABVP, released a video in May claiming credit for the proposed pedestrian underpass connecting Panjab University and PGIMER. The underpass, however, has remained a long-pending proposal and is being executed by the Chandigarh administration, which recently floated tenders for the project after years of planning and consultations. The university itself is not the implementing agency.Senior university officials acknowledge that student representatives often play an important role in highlighting issues before the administration, but caution against drawing a direct link between every representation and the eventual execution of a project. “Students do raise genuine issues and many of those are taken seriously. But many works are already planned, budgeted or under process. Some things are bound to happen, and they happen. It would not be correct to attribute every development solely to one representation, protest or individual,” a senior official said, requesting anonymity.Officials point out that infrastructure projects typically involve technical approvals, budgetary allocations, tendering processes and coordination between multiple departments or even different govt agencies before execution begins.Even so, the growing use of social media has added a new dimension to campus politics. Announcement videos, before-and-after photographs, screenshots of memorandums and celebratory posts now accompany many visible developments on campus, allowing different leaders and organisations to present them as evidence of their effectiveness.With more student groups actively documenting their interventions online, the competition increasingly appears to extend beyond raising issues to ensuring that the eventual outcome is also seen as their achievement.Box: From repaired roads to accessibility projects and a proposed underpass, social media has become the latest platform where student leaders are projecting campus developments as outcomes of their own interventions, even when many works have been in the pipeline for years.Box – Recent credit claims on campusUILS parking road repair: Claimed separately by UILS student leader Gurnoor Kanda, citing his six-day hunger strike, and by PUCSC vice-president Ashmeet Singh, citing memorandums submitted to university authorities.PwD accessibility works: Projected by PUCSC as an achievement, though the works are part of the Centre-funded SIPDA project worth around Rs 54 crore, following an accessibility audit conducted in Dec 2023.PU-PGI pedestrian underpass: Claimed by ABVP-backed PUCSC president Gaurav Veer Sohal through a social media video, although the long-pending project is being executed by the Chandigarh administration after years of planning.
