Shas­tri Boodan

Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies stu­dents at the St Au­gus­tine cam­pus will have 450 rooms avail­able to them in Sep­tem­ber says Sci­ence, Tech­nol­o­gy and Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Fazal Karim. The min­is­ter said he would not tol­er­ate any UWI stu­dent be­ing housed in con­tain­ers and has since launched an in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to re­ports that a land­lord in St Au­gus­tine was prepar­ing used freight con­tain­ers as rental apart­ments for UWI stu­dents. Karim was speak­ing to the T&T Guardian at Rien­zi Com­plex, Cou­va, yes­ter­day.

The Sun­day Guardian car­ried a re­port that a chron­ic short­age of ac­com­mo­da­tion for stu­dents in and around the St Au­gus­tine cam­pus has led to one land­lord con­vert­ing freight con­tain­ers in­to apart­ments to house stu­dents. The con­struc­tion of the con­tain­er "homes" was raised at a pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion for land­lords at UWI on June 26, at­tend­ed by Karim and Prakash Ra­mad­har, the?St Au­gus­tine MP and Le­gal Af­fairs Min­is­ter and of­fi­cials from the UWI.

He said 450 rooms would be­come avail­able along the St John's Road. These new fa­cil­i­ties would be avail­able at just over $1,000 a month, he added. Karim said liv­ing in used freight con­tain­ers could prove to be a health and safe­ty risk. He said he ex­pect­ed a re­port on this mat­ter in one week's time. He said the uni­ver­si­ty would pro­vide in­for­ma­tion to stu­dents and was con­sid­er­ing a cer­tifi­cate of ap­proval for liv­ing quar­ters and that land­lords en­sure stu­dents were housed in prop­er fa­cil­i­ties.