Friday , September 3 , 2010
IN TODAY'S PAPER
THE TELEGRAPH
IIT boy death from campus neglect: Panel
BASANT KUMAR MOHANTY
A picture of Rohit Kumar from an IIT Kharagpur magazine
New Delhi, Sept. 2: A panel inquiring into the death of an IIT Kharagpur student, who suffered brain injury after falling from a rickshaw, has blamed the institute hospital and pulled up Madhusudan Chakraborty, who is now the IIT Bhubaneswar director, The Telegraph has learnt.
The two-member committee has said Rohit Kumar, the third-year BTech student who died on March 22, 2009, when he was being driven to a Calcutta hospital in a non-critical-care ambulance, lost his life because of laxities in health care facilities on the campus, sources said.
Justice Malay Kumar Basu and former IIM Calcutta director Subir Chowdhury rapped Chakraborty, who was then the chairman of the hospital management committee, and said he should have been “more proactive in the administration of the hospital”.
He was also working as the CEO of the IIT Hospital when the incident happened.
Rohit Kumar’s belongings before being taken away from his hostel in March 2009 after his death
The hospital did not have expert doctors and advanced facilities to treat Rohit, the report said. There was no qualified doctor in the ambulance that was taking him to Calcutta, it added. The panel’s report will be discussed at a meeting of the board of governors of IIT Kharagpur on Saturday.
Rohit’s death had sparked protests by students, forcing Damodar Acharya to resign as institute director on “moral grounds”.
Chakraborty, who was deputy director at that time, was designated officiating director. He was later appointed director of IIT Bhubaneswar. Acharya was reinstated as IIT Kharagpur director.
Another committee that the IIT authorities had set up had absolved the hospital doctors, saying their diagnosis was correct.
Students of IIT Kharagpur, who took out a candlelight march to protest Rohit’s death, also demanded the replacement of former Supreme Court judge U.C. Banners, appointed to probe the circumstances that led to the death.
At a meeting with the chairman of the institute’s board of governors on March 27, 2010, the students said they wanted someone not linked with the institute in any way to conduct the probe. “U.C. Banerjee is at the Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law (on the campus) frequently as a guest lecturer. We want him replaced by someone who is an external personality,” said a student.
At the meeting, in which no one except the chairman of the institute — then Tata Steel MD B. Muthuraman — and the students were allowed, he apparently promised the probe would be conducted by an “outsider”. He was also quoted as saying that if Banerjee was in any way connected with the institute, steps would be taken to ensure a “fair external investigation”.
Keeping the students’ demand in mind, a new panel of Justice Basu and IIM Calcutta director Chowdhury was formed.
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IIT boy death from campus neglect: Panel •
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