JNUTA alleges ‘plan underway’ to transfer university-run guest house to body under MEA

The association questioned why the proposal had not been placed before the university’s Executive Council, which it described as the “custodian of all property of the University.”

However, the row over the potential sale of the university-run guest house is not new. In August 2024, the administration had stated that it was exploring leasing out the property to offset mounting maintenance costs. That same month, the Jawaharlal Nehru Students’ Union (JNUSU) staged a ten-day protest at Sabarmati T-Point, accusing the administration of ignoring long-pending demands.

During the demonstrations, former JNUSU president Nitish Kumar alleged that the university was preparing to “sell the Gomti Guest House to raise money to run the campus,” and that “next, they might put other parts up for rent for commercial purposes.”

Following this, in a Facebook post last year, JNU said that unlike many other central universities that generate 20–30% of their budgets internally, its own internal receipts were negligible. “Students in JNU pay fees as low as Rs 10 and Rs 20 till date,” the post noted, adding that the Ministry of Education had continued to subsidise growing student and research needs but that the university was “still unable to meet the ever-increasing costs” of infrastructure, books, digital resources, and research materials.

“In such a scenario,” the administration wrote, “one has to plan for the future.” It had argued that JNU needed to find new income streams “without raising fees,” and that public-private partnerships could offer ways to “run, revamp, reuse, and optimise JNU assets” to generate stable revenue.