Most students at IIT Madras reside in the hostels, where extracurricular activities complement the academic routine. The campus has 18 hostels, of which four, Sharavati, Sarayu, Sabarmati and the recently (2017) constructed Tunga are exclusively for women. In earlier times each hostel had attached dining facilities but all of them have been closed down. Dining facilities are provided in three centralised halls namely Nilgiri, Vindhya and Himalaya. The hostels may accommodate undergraduate and graduate students, though they tend to keep the two apart. Students are assigned to hostels at the time of admission, where they usually spend their entire stay at the institute.