Why are crores of rupees spent for organising college cultural fests, that money can be used for better living conditions/research in the respective colleges or for other more constructive purposes?
I’m a student of BITS Pilani, one of the biggest private engineering colleges in India. Now, I cannot answer this answer from the aspect of IITs or NITs because my college gets almost no funding from the government (neither for academic purposes, nor for festive purposes). Now, I’d also clear the air that I haven’t been to any of the fests at any IIT or NIT, so my perspective is strictly about my college.First off, as I already said, my college gets negligible funding from the government. Also, my college administration doesn’t provide a single penny for our college fests. This means that all the fests (cultural, technical and sports fests) are organised completely by the students of the college. Having been a member of the technical fest team in college and the sponsorship team, I can tell you that it’s impossible to use the crores of money spent on fests for a betterment of college facilities.Organising the fests need sponsors and sponsors that we get are youth oriented corporations like MTV, VH1, RedBull, T.I.M.E, Gillette etc. If we get sponsors like MTV and invest the sponsorship amount in getting a better line up of artists then we’ll have more footfall and more footfall ensures that we get more sponsors next year.If we start investing our sponsorship amount in betterment of the college , our fest will not grow (the footfall will not increase) and we won’t be able to get big enough sponsors next year. If tomorrow I decide to devote even 20% of my sponsorship amount towards betterment of the college, the college fest will need to be closed within a span of 2–3 years. This is apparent if you adjust for inflation (contrary to what BJP says, the inflation is around 7–8%), you adjust for the yearly hike in the fee of artists and you adjust the decrease in sponsorship due to decreasing footfalls.Believe me, it’s not that we don’t want to work for the betterment of our college, the truth is that we cannot afford to take such responsibilities because our sponsors are youth sponsors who have absolutely 0 interest in improving the facilities of the college. If we start spending our sponsorship amount on improving our college facilities, we’ll lose our sponsors’ support in the future.