IIT Kharagpur has decided to lodge FIRs in connection with the deaths of two students — Shaon Malik from Calcutta and Aniket Walkar from Maharashtra — and a junior lab technician, Sakir Ali Mollah, after a prod from the Supreme Court.
The IIT authorities on Thursday lodged an FIR in connection with the death of Md Asif Quamar, a third-year student who was found dead on the campus on May 4. This came a day after the apex court sought to know if an FIR had been registered after Asif’s death in pursuance of the court’s March 24 order.
When Metro on Thursday asked IIT Kharagpur’s acting director Amit Patra whether an FIR would be lodged over Aniket’s death on April 20, he said in a text message they were “looking into it”.
On Friday, Patra, also director of IIT BHU (Varanasi), said: “We decided to lodge FIRs over the deaths of three students and a junior lab technician. The four were found dead during my tenure as acting director of IIT Kharagpur. The Supreme Court has given a clear directive on what the higher educational institutes are required to do. This will be adhered to.”
“The FIR in connection with Md Asif Quamar’s death has already been lodged. The other three FIRs will be lodged in a day or two,” he said.
Patra has been serving as the acting director of IIT Kharagpur since January.
A Supreme Court division bench of Justices J.B. Pardiwala and R. Mahadevan said in a written order on March 24: “We are of the view that the responsibility of maintaining the safety and well-being of students rests heavily on the administration of every educational institution. Therefore, in the event of any unfortunate incident, such as a suicide occurring on campus, it becomes their unequivocal duty to lodge an F.I.R. with the appropriate authorities promptly.”
“Such action is not only a legal obligation but also a moral imperative to ensure transparency, accountability, and the pursuit of justice,” the court said while constituting a national task force to address mental health concerns of students and prevent suicides at higher education institutions.
On Thursday, Sudeep Walkar, Aniket’s elder brother, had wondered why the institute had not yet lodged an FIR.
On Friday, Sudeep told Metro: “We are relieved to know that the FIR has been lodged. But this should have been done much earlier, considering what the Supreme Court said on March 24.”
On Friday, Sudeep told Metro: “We are relieved to know that the FIR has been lodged. But this should have been done much earlier, considering what the Supreme Court said on March 24.”
The deaths of Shaon, Aniket, and Asif in four months have left many in the institute and outside concerned. The institute has been accused of insensitivity and callousness in probing the reasons for so many deaths in quick succession at the IIT.
Patra said it was not clear to him why police did not lodge an FIR each time they alerted the cops about the deaths on the campus.
“It is not that we did not inform the police whenever a student was found dead on the campus. We may not have explicitly sought that an FIR be filed, but the police could have lodged it. Henceforth, we will specifically tell the police to lodge an FIR in case of a death on the campus,” Patra.
Sudeep, who graduated from IIT Guwahati in 2022, wrote to Kharagpur Town police on April 28 requesting them to urgently lodge an FIR based on the complaint.
Calls and text messages to Dhritiman Sarkar, West Midnapore superintendent of police, went unanswered on Friday.
