Bhowanipore: The father of Amit Mondal, the 23-year-old man who died nine days ago after waiting three months for a free brain stent under a government scheme, said on Sunday that he would always regret not being able to pay the bribe that a storekeeper at the Bangur Institute of Neurosciences had allegedly demanded to complete the paperwork.

"Had I been well off, I would have paid the bribe and got (storekeeper) Palash Dutta to sign the file and move it. I and my wife instead watched helplessly day after day as our son suffered and finally died. We couldn't do a thing about it," said Dhananjoy Mondal, who makes a living as a mason.

Dhananjoy said he had made multiple requests to the storekeeper at the Bangur Institute of Neurosciences, which is a part of SSKM Hospital, to move the file. Amit, a commerce graduate from South City College, had been admitted to the hospital for treatment of brain aneurysm on January 25.

Amit's hospitalisation came after a nine-month wait for a bed at the hospital. Since his family did not have enough money for his treatment, admission to a state-run hospital was the only way he would get a free stent to repair a bulging blood vessel in the brain. The stent is priced at Rs 7 lakh, but meant to be given free to a patient being treated in a government hospital.

D.K. Roy, the doctor treating Amit, had written a note to storekeeper Dutta for the stent on the day of his admission.

Amit, six feet and three inches tall, had aspired to be a traffic sergeant, his father said.

"I was looking forward to him getting his dream job.... Now we don't know what will happen to us in our old age," Dhananjoy said.

Amit was the only child of Dhananjoy and his wife Jharna, a homemaker.

Dhananjoy said storekeeper Dutta, who has been arrested, had told him that he would get the stent his son needed the very next day after paying him Rs 3.5 lakh.

The mason had tried to meet the director of the state-run institute to look into his son's case, but was allegedly turned away by his personal assistant.

Unable to meet him, Dhananjoy said he made several visits to chief minister Mamata Banerjee's residence and the office of minister Aroop Biswas, who is the chairman of the Rogi Kalyan Samiti at SSKM Hospital.

He managed to procure a note from the chief minister's office, dated March 20, 2018, directing the hospital authorities to process the request for a stent to save Amit's life.

A senior doctor whom Metro spoke to said that based on the case history of the patient and the death certificate - it mentions "cardio respiratory failure in a known case of right para posterior communicating arteryaneurysm" - it could be surmised that he died because the stent was not implanted.

"The patient suffered a second stroke and that was the cause of cardio respiratory failure. What is sad is that there was a long gap (more than a year) between the first stroke and the second, which he did not survive because a stent was not introduced by then," said the head of the microsurgery department at a reputable private hospital.

Debasis Bhattacharyya, the director of medical education in Bengal, said the authorities would probe whether storekeeper Dutta had asked for and received bribes from families of other patients.

Sources said Dutta became storekeeper at the Bangur Institute of Neurosciences in December 2017, after the person who had held that post retired from service.