Fighting God must be easier

Student clubs are like the heartbeats of campus life, pumping energy into our academic journey. At IIT Tirupati, we love our clubs—they're where friendships form, ideas spark, and skills blossom. But lately, our clubs have been facing a big problem: getting the money they need to do the awesome stuff.

Every student here chips in a little extra cash called the student affairs fee. This money is supposed to help fund all kinds of cool club activities—sports, tech projects, artsy stuff, you name it. It's like our way of saying, "Let's make campus life amazing together!"

Now, imagine you're a student with a brilliant plan for your club. You've been selected as the club leader fair and square, and you're pumped to make things happen. You have plans and a long list of ideas that you plan to execute over the next academic year.  But somehow, 8 or 9 months into your tenure, you’ve realized that you’ve hardly ticked off the boxes. All of your dreams of high tech equipment and instruments and cameras and competitions…still remain dreams. 

The problem? 

In order to truly highlight the problem, let’s play a game.

Let’s put you in the shoes of a newly appointed Club Coordinator. That’ll make you understand the authors' mindset while penning down their thoughts. Mind you; this has been written after several weeks of cool-down period. 

Now, back to you as a newly appointed club coordinator. You’re perhaps aware of how the Club’s been going, and you most likely already know a thing or two about what you want to do during your tenure. Now you need money.

And you enter the Administrative Building, let’s lovingly call it Admin.

It’s quite the building, a quiet, calm, almost serene ambience, and a view of the evening sun so profound, Heaven could be built in its image. Little do you know, on your first trip, that you’ve just walked into the deepest, darkest pit in Hell.

Your previous coordinator probably reassured you that the procedure, although tedious, is surely doable and within the bounds of sanity an average human can take. With an Approval Form and a Fund Availability form in your hand, you enter, ready to face the world. Oh, you poor thing.

News flash, there’s a change. A big one. Apparently, the Institute’s Accounts Section has been struggling to match the numbers. Hence, all procedures are to be modified and are to be a lot more streamlined and easily accountable.

The weapons you brought to the fight (your trusty Approval Note and Fund Availability Forms) are no longer effective. What you need, now, is an Armada. A handful of the most carefully picked, crafted and perfected Forms and Notes to get your job done. You want to get some money reimbursed? You’ll need an Axe with an ivory handle. You need to purchase a small trinket and need some money in advance? You’ll need a Recurve Bow fitted with a quick draw wrapping. You need to get a big sum of money moved to a vendor? You’ll have to fell two mammoths and gather their intestines, with the help of the Recurve Bow from before.

The magic here is the question, “How did you find out all this?”

The answer, you utter in a voice so disheartened and lost, “I kept trying. I’ve been at it for 8 months.”

That’s right. The reason you managed to find out so many details on how to get things done in Admin is because you kept trying. You kept getting it wrong. Until one day, you got it right.

By now, you’ve definitely asked both yourself and the people in Admin countless times,

“Why did you not tell me this before?”

“Why am I hearing about this now?”

The answer to that, however, dear Coordinator, is simply “They don’t know either”.

The people at Admin are, for the first time in a few years apparently, taking matters of Student Funds seriously. Every rupee is to be accounted for. Every purchase/action/transaction is to be approved beforehand. Every bill must be legitimate. Every signature must be procured in the correct order.

And so, they’re figuring it out too. With you. And they’re convinced that you work the same way as they do, and any information that reaches them, somehow, magically, reaches you too.

 Oh, you poor thing, how you wish you’d known all of this beforehand.

You may not believe it, but the solution is within that sentence right there. If you’d known all of this beforehand. Perhaps, you may have fared much better.

Or rather not applied for the post in the first place.

As a government institution, some things cannot be avoided. Paperwork, GeM (Government e-marketplace), approvals and signatures are all part of the deal. After all, our own professors have to go through the same procedures to procure their lab equipment and whatnot. The only way to truly survive Admin is to know it beforehand. As Sun Tzu once said, “If you know the enemy and yourself, you need not fear the outcomes of a hundred battles”.

To put things into perspective, this year’s Admin experience has single-handedly managed to crush the morale of club coordinators and push them to new, unknown levels of rock bottom, by simply being an Enigma. An Enigma that could have been a stroll in a vibrant garden if the warriors knew which weapons to bring and which battles to fight. An Enigma full of people who think they provide brutal honesty but in reality, are only aware of brutality.

We say all this about club coordinators; imagine secretaries. The worst fate a man can bring upon himself, second to Jack Sparrow’s being lost in Davy Jones’ Locker, would be to depend on Admin for his tenure’s success.

A direct consequence of this problem is that many students end up using their own money, or rather their parents' money, to keep the clubs running smoothly, with the expectation that they'll be reimbursed later. You guessed it right, this process is by no means any faster than taking advance sums. As students, most of us aren't rolling in dough—we're here to learn, not earn. How can anyone expect our clubs to deliver top-notch results when they're struggling just to function? 

But apparently, the student body is also here to complain when something goes wrong. 

It's also apparently very fluent with the sentence, 

"But no one asked you to do this. You chose this responsibility"

It's disheartening to see students digging into their own pockets to keep our clubs afloat, only to face endless delays in getting their money back. This isn't just about finances—it's about trust and respect. We need a system that respects our efforts and supports our growth, not one that leaves us high and dry.

We get it; keeping track of money is important. But does it have to be this hard? We think not. That's why we're calling for a change—a more straightforward, smoother way of handling club funds.

Here's our idea: let's bring things online! Imagine a website where we can easily request funds, track approvals, and keep all our documents safe. No more running back and forth to the admin office or getting lost in a sea of paperwork. With just a few clicks, we can get the ball rolling on our club events and projects.

While ideas like these surface once in a while, it’s almost certain that such technology is too far advanced for Admin to handle. It is unfortunate, but Admin is about to see another change to procedures next year. And another a year after that. 

But there's another problem looming on the horizon. The new rules say that for any big purchase, the institute will only give us part of the money upfront. We have to wait until the stuff we ordered is delivered to get the rest. Sounds fair, right? Wrong. Imagine trying to buy equipment for a club project and only getting a fraction of the money upfront. No supplier would agree to that!

This is perhaps the worst year in the history of this institution to become a Secretary/Club Coordinator.

And may we be redeemed, for that might just be an understatement.

It’s hard to believe that this is the path Admin is treading as a young and growing institution. This is the time to establish, to experiment, to allow simple transactions and to trust. The rules are supposed to keep us from going astray, not keep us from going anywhere at all. Administrative protocols should facilitate, not hinder, the pursuit of excellence—an ethos that underpins our institutional ethos.