Kharagpur/Calcutta, Oct. 18: An IIT Kharagpur student was arrested today while selling heroin outside the tech school’s gate.

“We caught Preyankar Biswas, a student of IIT Kharagpur, red-handed while he was selling heroin at an eatery near the institute,” said Rajesh Kumar Singh, superintendent of police (SP), West Midnapore.

The police said the 27-year-old from Gaighata, North 24-Parganas, was a student of the agricultural and food engineering department and an addict himself.

IIT authorities said Biswas had joined the institute in 1997 but repeatedly failed his examinations from first year onwards. His name was struck off the rolls three years ago before he was re-admitted this academic year.

According to IIT rules, a student gets a maximum of eight years to clear all the papers in the four-year BTech course. After this, his name is struck off. Biswas, however, had moved Calcutta High Court and received permission to sit for the papers he had failed in, leading to his re-admission.

“It is difficult to slot a year for him. Although he had studied up to final year, there is a backlog of papers he has to clear right from first year,” said D.K. Tripathy, dean of student affairs. “Biswas had already completed eight years and failed in a lot of papers, so he was asked to leave.”

The police said they received a tip-off that Biswas was peddling drugs. This afternoon, when he left the campus, plainclothes police trailed him. Biswas first went to Panchberia, about 5km from the campus, and bought some pouches.

The police did not catch him then, nor the person who handed him the pouches. They waited for Biswas to make his next move. The IIT student returned to the institute but did not enter the campus.

Instead, he walked across to an eatery close to the campus. Just as he was about to pass some pouches to his “customers”, the cops caught him.

“About 100gm of heroin, worth about Rs 5 lakh in the international market, was seized,” SP Singh said.

Officers raided Biswas’s room and found two persons hiding there.. “They were outsiders and were obviously known to Biswas,” Singh said. “They had drugs on them and we arrested them too.”

If the charges are proved against Biswas, he may get a life term.

“The police are doing what they have to do. The institute will decide its course of action after the director, who is out of town, returns to Kharagpur,” dean Tripathy said.