Namit Kumar

A Class II student playing in front of his school in Salt Lake while waiting for the school bus to fill up was critically injured in a hit-and-run accident on Wednesday.

Nine-year-old Namit Kumar, a student of Kendriya Vidyalaya I at Laboni, had finished writing his environment studies exam around 11am and was escorted out of the main gate by the bus conductor along with some classmates. He obediently boarded the bus, parked in a lane near the school, but became restless as the minutes ticked by.

Namit then got off the vehicle and began to play with a couple of classmates. “When I spotted him, he was on the main road trying to retrieve a rubber ball. A speeding Tata Sumo knocked him down, stopped for a moment and sped away,” a witness said.

Polly Chakraborty, a guardian who was waiting for her ward to come out of the school, noted down the number of the Tata Sumo. “I missed the alphabet after ‘WB02’ but the number was 2337. I have given the police this piece of information,” she said.

The car hadn’t been traced till late in the evening.

Bystanders tried to stop several vehicles to take Namit to the nearest hospital but none halted. Someone hired a taxi and took the unconscious boy to the Bidhannagar sub-divisional hospital. The school authorities shifted him to NRS Medical College and Hospital around 2pm, from where he was taken to Apollo Gleneagles Hospitals in the evening.

Doctors said Namit suffered brain haemorrhage and was slipping in and out of consciousness.

The boy’s father, Ramesh Ram, is an employee of Saregama Ltd and works in the HMV unit on Jessore Road. The family stays in a rented house at 2/3 Jibon Ratan Dhar Road, near Airport Gate No. 1.

Namit’s mother Uma Devi said her son was a quiet child who seldom needed to be scolded for anything. “He was looking forward to visiting the zoo after writing the last paper on Thursday. I can’t believe he is lying in a hospital bed and fighting for his life,” she sobbed.

Teacher Anjali Das said it was the norm for conductors of private school buses to escort children out by showing their identity cards and the list of students at the gate. “There was no negligence on our part. It was just an unfortunate incident. Namit isn’t a good student but excels in drawing and painting. Ironically, the art exam is slated for Thursday.”