The Context: A recent tender published on the official AIL website, titled “Detailed Engineering and Project Management Consultancy Services,” has greenlit the construction of multi-storey hostels and academic blocks on the 1.44-acre Sector 69 land. This site, currently houses the college’s only football and cricket grounds. This decision, made without any consultation with the student-athletes or stakeholders, effectively prioritizes a massive increase in student intake over the survival of our sports culture and existing infrastructure.
THE CONCRETE COFFIN: A REQUIEM FOR THE DUST
There is a specific kind of silence that exists in a PDF[1]. I’m staring at a tender notice on the AIL website, and it reads like a death warrant for the soul of this institution. 1.44 acres. Sector 69. Multi-storey hostels. Academic blocks. Pedestrian over-bridge. To the ghouls in suits sitting in air-conditioned offices, those are just dimensions. To them, 1.44 acres is a blank canvas for more seats, more revenue, and more “infrastructure” to house the 180-student-per-batch factory they’ve turned this college into. But to those of us who have spent the last four years bleeding into that dirt, those aren’t dimensions. That is our fucking sanctuary.
For years, the heartbeat of this college has not been in the mughal garden or the moot courts. It has been at the end of a 200-meter walk. The walk over the main road, leaving the claustrophobia of the campus behind, is a ritual of purification. You leave behind the politics, the begging for attendance, and the crushing weight of being a damn roll number. You walk over the road, and you enter a world where the only thing that matters is the honesty of your effort. It is more than a “sports complex.” It is the only place in this godforsaken institution where we are allowed to be human.
The football ground and the cricket ground are the lungs of AIL. And now the administration has decided to let them fail for the sake of their profit margin. They talk of “Stakeholders” everywhere, but they never reached out to the very people who breathe life into that land. Nobody asked the athletes. Nobody asked the students who take refuge there when the walls of their hostel rooms seem to be closing in on them. Nobody asked those who have spent nights and dawns transforming that dust into a home. They just put a price tag on our safe haven and called on the lowest bidder to come and wipe away our memories. They are selling our peace of mind to construct more classrooms where they teach us bullshit about equity and justice. The irony is fucking sickening.
It’s the ultimate betrayal of AIL: they’ll build a “Pedestrian Over Bridge” to connect us to a graveyard. They’re building a bridge to nowhere, because once the grass is gone and the goalposts are uprooted, there is nothing left on the other side worth crossing for. This college has been built into a money-making machine oiled by greed. We didn’t grow from 80 to 180 students out of some noble want to cultivate more legal minds; it was all about the clearance of more checks. And now, with space running out for their “human capital,” they’re aiming to take our lungs next. They’re swapping our sanity for cement. They’re trading our grit for “Academic Blocks” that will only serve to remind us how little they truly care about the people inside them.
I’m only months away from graduation. Instead of feeling that reflective, bittersweet tug, I am hit with a white-hot, jagged frustration. I’m watching those in charge perform a slow-motion erasing of our culture. You cannot forge a legacy on a foundation built on a basis of betrayal. You can’t teach justice within the walls built from the ruins of your students’ sanctuary. The dust of the ground is in our lungs. And if they think we’re going to let them bury it without a scream, they haven’t been paying attention to how we play on that pitch.
They have a name for it: “progress.” In the antiseptic, profit-driven parlance of a college tender, it is known as “Development.” But let us peel away the semantics and examine the bare bones of this proposal. This is not about improving the law school; this is about the insatiable appetite of a factory. For years, we have observed the growth of the intake figures from 100 to 120 to an astonishing 180. Every additional body is an additional pay check for an administration that views us as nothing more than commodities. However, the infrastructure is a stagnant, festering joke. And so, having exhausted every available space to stash their “human capital” within the walls, they have set their sights on the only area where we could have taken a breath: Sector 69.
The plan mentions “Recreational Facilities” tucked away in a multi-storey hostel. Are they fucking serious? You cannot replicate the horizon of a football pitch in a goddamn basement. You cannot bottle the feeling of the wind hitting your face as you sprint down the wing and try to sell it back to us in a “common room” or a broken ping-pong table. They are trading the sky for a ceiling. They are trading the open air for the smell of wet cement and overcrowded corridors.
But this isn’t just about the ground. This is about the total, suffocating enclosure of our lives. While they move to kill the only “Safe Zone” we have outside these walls, they are busy turning the inside into a panopticon. Cameras are being installed in the hostels, stripping away the last shred of privacy we had left. It is peak authoritarianism. They want to watch us in our hostels, watch us in the halls, and now, they want to bury the one place where they couldn’t watch us-the pitch. They don’t want students; they want inmates. They want a controlled, monitored, revenue-generating population that doesn’t ask questions. Each month, we see a new, breathtakingly stupid administrative move, but this tender is the culmination of their stupidity. It is the end of reason. They will invest crores of rupees in a “Pedestrian Over Bridge” to link the campus to a graveyard. They are building a bridge to a memory. They are building a walkway to a concrete slab where our toil and our sanity used to reside.
To the Class of 2026: we are leaving. In a few months, we will bid those gates adieu for the final time. It is a peculiar kind of cruelty to be watching one’s home being torn down while still standing in the doorway. We might probably be one of the last generations to know what it is to cross that road and find freedom. The next lot of students coming in will not have a “Safe Zone.” They will have 180-seat classrooms, cameras trained on them at all times, and the crushing presence of a college that has forgotten that students are human beings, not just pin code like roll numbers with a bank balance.
This administration doesn’t give a fuck about legacy. They only care about the balance sheet. They are paving over our hearts to make way for more fees. They are choking the culture of sports because you can’t monetize a sunset over a football field, but you can monetize a hostel room. If this is the “Future of AIL,” then the future is a cage. They can build their blocks, they can pour their concrete, and they can bridge the gap to the “new acad blocks”, but they will never be able to build over the fact that they sold the soul of this college for a few more acres of profit.
The dust is settling, but not the way they think. We see the greed. We see the surveillance. And we won’t forget what you’ll bury under that concrete.
–This article has been written by Adarsh, Football Team Captain.
[1] https://ail.ac.in/pdf/DETAILED-ENGINEERING-AND-PROJECT-MANAGEMENT-CONSULTANCY-SERVICES-%20FOR-CONSTRUCTION-OF-MULTISTOREY-HOSTEL-BUILDING-&-RECREATIONAL-%20FACILITIES-AT-1.44-ACRE-LAND-(SECTOR%2069)-AT-ARMY-INSTITUTE-OF-LAW-(AIL)-%20SECTOR-68-MOHALI-PUNJAB.pdf
