The words “seminar hall” remain inscribed on a board above the sealed wooden door. A faded yellow tape warns: “Do Not Cross the Line.”
The hall sits at the end of a narrow corridor on the third floor of RG Kar Medical College and Hospital’s Emergency Building — a corridor that, unlike those on other floors, was mostly deserted on Thursday afternoon. The government-run hospital is one of the busiest in the state, treating thousands of patients every day.
To the left stand rows of rooms for doctors, the department head, and other faculty members of the chest medicine department. The corridor leads to a TB Ward.
Saturday, August 9, will mark one year since a junior doctor was found raped and murdered inside this seminar hall.
The present scene
Today, uniformed policemen sit on wooden chairs and a bench at the entrance to the sealed hall. A jawan of the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) sits opposite them. Security cameras monitor every movement around the clock.
No one walking down the corridor slows down near the sealed doors. No one looks directly at them. In police parlance, this is the “PO” — the place of occurrence.
Two discarded door frames lean against the wall near collapsible gates leading to the corridor. Heaps of plastic bottles lie dumped beneath the abandoned frames. Small chunks of broken concrete sit opposite the plastic garbage — remnants from renovation work that was started on the third floor and later abandoned, according to junior doctors.
“Civil construction works have been carried out in some of the departments, including gynaecology, medicine, and radiology, of the medical college and hospital in keeping with the demands of the doctors and the nursing staff,” said Aniket Mahata, an anaesthesiologist and among the group of junior doctors who spearheaded the movement seeking justice for their slain colleague.
“There are space constraints in each of the wards. So carving out space for new construction or some civil work isn’t easy,” Mahata added.
The building’s daily life
The Emergency Building’s patient lift opens into a lobby where two private security guards and a CISF jawan are posted. The lobby leads to a nursing station where doctors sit at one end of a wooden table covered with blue cloth, all wearing masks.
A nurse in uniform pores over papers behind them. In rows of small wooden squares behind her, medicines and prescriptions are neatly tucked away. Another staff member carefully folds green cotton sheets from an almirah onto a trolley.
The seminar room lies further down from this nursing station. The corridor housing it has two green dustbins — one small, one large — and remains notably clean compared to other floors.
The tragedy
Investigations have revealed that on August 9, 2024, the 31-year-old doctor was last seen entering the seminar hall around 2am to rest for the night. At approximately 9.30am, two colleagues found her lying unconscious on a mattress, her clothes dishevelled and blood visible.
She was dead. The post- mortem confirmed rape.
Remembrance
Her fellow doctors and others have come together to install a sculpture — “Cry of the Hour”— some 500 metres from the hall where she died.