Anamitra Roy, a senior research fellow at IISER Kolkata who apparently died by suicide last week after alleging bullying and ragging by a peer for his autism, had months earlier participated in groundbreaking research on dog behaviour as first author.
The study revealed that street dogs have a striking preference for the colour yellow, which can sometimes trump the attraction even of food and outweigh the sense of smell in their decision-making. The Telegraph had reported the findings on February 3 this year.
Some of Roy’s peers and teachers on Sunday mourned the loss of “a brilliant young mind” and promising scientist.
“He was not only a very good student but also a splendid human being. His research was effective and insightful,” one of his teachers at the institute said.
“His passing is a great loss, not only for the IISER but also the scientific community, because of what he could have gone on to achieve.”
Police said they were likely to question Roy’s alleged tormentor Sourabh Biswas, a senior research scholar, and their common supervisor Anindita Bhadra, whom Roy had accused in a Facebook post of ignoring his complaints against Biswas.
Bhadra had supervised the dog study Roy was part of. Some IISER students on Sunday praised her as a “mother figure” and some teachers feared Biswas was being unfairly tainted, suggesting what was being portrayed as bullying may have been an intra-lab dispute.
IISER’s director of student affairs, Ayan Banerjee, resigned as chief of its anti-ragging committee, which Roy had accused in his FB post of sitting over his ragging complaints. His resignation is yet to be accepted.
The research
Field experiments by Roy and his colleagues had found that most stray dogs moved towards yellow bowls, even when they were empty, in preference to blue and grey bowls that contained food. This was the first study to establish a clear, statistically supported colour preference in dogs.
“They could smell the chicken and they could see the chicken, but they picked empty yellow bowls,” Roy had told this newspaper at the time. “In this situation, they trusted their eyes more than their noses.”
The findings initially appeared in the US government’s National Library of Medicine (PubMed) and on ResearchGate.net, and later in the European journalAnimal Cognition.
Roy, a third-year scholar and resident of Saheb Bagan in Shyamnagar, was found unconscious inside the IISER’s biology laboratory on Thursday night after he took an overdose of the anti-depressant pills prescribed to him. He was taken to AIIMS Kalyani where he died on Friday morning.
On Sunday, many students and researchers said Bhadra’s sterling role as guide and supervisor “cannot be ignored” but said that Roy’s charges, in the FB post made hours before his death, could notbe ignored.
“Being the lady supervisor, Anindita Madam was like a mother figure to all of us. So how could she ignore it when Anamitra brought allegations of bullying against another scholar? It is really very hurtful,” a student told this newspaper on the condition of anonymity.
Some faculty members defended Biswas.
“Anamitra’s death has turned things against him. But Anamitra, too, was quite rude to him. A contentious laboratory dispute has been given the colour of bullying and ragging, which is far from the truth. He also deserves justice,” a teacher said.
An IISER Kolkata spokesperson denied the allegation of ragging.
“Ragging is ruled out in Anamitra’s case. He had been a student of the institute for the past eight years. Thisis more likely a case of intra-lab dispute,” the spokesperson said.
“We have submitted all the details to the police and are cooperating with them. Both internal and external investigations are under way and we will be able to come to a conclusion once the fact-finding committee submits its report.”
A team from Haringhata police examined the biology lab on Saturday evening. Some students alleged the officers treated the “crime scene” with cavalier abandon and handled without gloves some articles used by Roy, ignoring their potential value as evidence.
Fact-finding panel
IISER Kalyani has formed a four-member fact-finding committee, made up of IIIT Kalyani director Santanu Chattopadhyay, Mohit Prasad (dean of administration, IISER Kalyani, and professor of biological sciences), Mousumi Das and Debasish Haldar (both professors with the department of chemical science).