Jamshedpur, March 29: The dispute between the National Institute of Technology and the people of adjacent Ashingi village over the right on a road has started assuming political overtones with members of Parliament making their presence felt.

Congress leader and Singhbhum MP Bagun Sumbrai, visiting the Ashingi village today, said to have promised the villagers to raise the issue on the floor of the Parliament.

The MP said he would ensure that the Ashingi Road, which has all along been a lifeline for the people of Ashingi and half-a-dozen other villages, would not be allowed to turn into an exclusive property of the NIT.

?I would fight for the people of Ashingi to its logical end. They have voted me to power, and it is my duty to stand by them in hard times,? said Sumbrai, while talking to The Telegraph.

A section of people, showing their allegiance to Jharkhand Mukti Morcha parliamentarian Sunil Mahto, has requested him to join the fight against the NIT.

The NIT authorities and the people of over half-a-dozen villages situated near the institute are at loggerheads over a road on which a student met with an accident last Saturday night.

The NIT students and faculties had temporarily forbidden villagers from entering the road on Monday morning.

Interestingly, the NIT authorities claim that an outsider was responsible for the mishap. It was the third incident to have taken place in a spell of mishaps occurred during the past five months, they alleged.

A senior National Institute of Technology functionary revealed that the recurrence of road mishaps involving outsiders had forced them to take the decision to ban the entry of outsiders into the road which was earlier being used by the villagers.

On the other hand, the villagers said there was an agreement between the authorities of National Institute of Technology then and the people of Ashingi village that the villagers would not be deprived of the facility of using the road in future.

?Ranjit Prasad, the principal of the RIT then, had promised the people while going ahead with the process of land acquisition from the people of Ashingi two decades ago that the villagers would be allowed to use the road. But after the RIT graduated to NIT, the latter?s tone has changed on the promise,? said one of the villagers.

Meanwhile, the condition of Abhisek Kumar Dubey, the student who sustained injuries in the road mishap last Saturday, continued to be serious.

The victim is still undergoing treatment in the Tata Main Hospital where he had undergone a surgery.