Nayan Adak (top), parents Maharani and Balaram

Sept. 10: A fresher in a private pharmacy college in Howrah has said his seniors allegedly told him to strip, dance and smoke and when he refused they slashed his hands with a blade and injected something into his body.

Nineteen year-old Nayan Adak drank pesticide yesterday, four days after he was ragged. “They told me they would kill me if I told any one about it. That is why I did not inform anybody. The physical pain was too much and I could not bear the mental agony. That is why I drank pesticide,” Nayan said from his nursing home bed in in Howrah’s Alampore.

Nayan, from Alinan village in East Midnapore’s Tamluk, is a day scholar at Calcutta Institute of Pharmaceutical Technology and Allied Health Sciences and has been attending classes for two months.

He said: “After I went to college on Saturday, some seniors took me to a room and asked me strip and dance. They also asked me to smoke. When I refused, they slashed my hands with a blade and injected something,” the farmer’s son said.

Nayan, however, did not ring up the anti-ragging helpline. His uncle Subal Adak lodged an FIR with Uluberia police today. Asked why the family did not alert the anti-ragging cell of the Union HRD ministry, Subal said they did not know there was such a facility.

“We want Nayan to get well first. After that, we will do whatever is required,” he said.

Nayan’s father Balaram said he noticed Nayan was behaving abnormally. “We became suspicious that something had happened after we saw cut marks on his hands. His left hand was wrapped in a piece of cloth. We repeatedly asked him what happened but he did not say anything,” Balaram said.

Mother Maharani said: “I asked yesterday what had happened but he stayed mum. Then I told him I would send his uncle to the college. After this, I went to the kitchen. When I went to his room after an hour, around 9am, I found him on the floor writhing in pain. There was a bottle of pesticide lying there.”

The medical superintendent of the Howrah nursing home, Buddhadeb Das, said Nayan “has slash marks on his hands and a swelling near his left elbow. We are not certain what injection he was given or whether he was injected with anything at all.”

Rabindra Debnath, the institute director, said the ragging allegation was “baseless”.