DU residential halls: Where food quality never improves

Students living in the halls of Dhaka University coming from different parts of the country have to eat food with low nutritional quality. And the cost of the food is beyond any logic considering the quality. As a result, students from low-income families in the village face extreme hardships to fulfil their basic needs like food.

What does the university administration think about this? Why is the quality of food in the hall not getting better? 

Because of food problems, many university students have to choose other ways. Some wake up late in the morning and eat breakfast and lunch together. Some students eat outside instead of eating in the hall.  

Atiq (pseudonym), a 2nd year student of DU, wakes up a little late in the morning to have breakfast and lunch together. If there is a class in the morning, he eats once after the class at around 12:30 noon. 

"I am eating this food just to survive. The environment of the canteen is dirty, the quality of the food is so bad, it is beyond description. We are suffering from malnutrition."

With such a poor quality of food, it is a real challenge for them even to fill up their basic energy needs and pay attention to their studies.

In the afternoon, many eat rice with fish, egg, chicken meat, and thin dal. 

Let's analyse the prices of food at Suryasen Hall of Dhaka University. In the breakfast, rice and egg are 35 Tk. Vegetables and chicken with rice cost 60 Tk, vegetables and fish cost 60 Tk during lunch. Prices during dinner are almost the same.

While these prices may sound reasonable, the food that is served will show a different picture altogether. Fish comes in as extremely fried, devoid of any distinct taste, maybe because they are rotten or something. The meat size is smaller than the potato slices in the curry. And the dal is so transparent that you won't know it's dal unless someone tells you so.

While it costs around 200-250 for 3 minimal meals a day, those meals won't be anywhere near giving you energy all day for productive hours. So it becomes necessary to have light meals in between, which is beyond affordability for many. 

According to nutritionists, adults should consume 270 to 450 grams of rice and flour daily. Also, 300 to 600 grams of vegetables and 150 to 350 grams of fish, meat, and eggs are optimum. A person should eat 30 to 45 ml of oil and fat and 30 to 60 grams of pulses daily to stay healthy.

From the description above, you can already guess that the foods served in DU hall canteens are far from those ranges.

Vice-Chancellor (VC) of Dhaka University, Prof. Akhtaruzzaman, said the price of everything is relatively high. Quality assurance is an important issue. This is what administrations are looking at seriously. They also monitor the canteens. They have been asked to pay attention to this matter.

However, there has been no sign of implications of these words as food quality continues to be low. Hence, university students wonder how a university with an annual budget of more than BDT 8 billion can't afford to allocate some extra budget for improving food, the most basic human need.

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