Jadavpur University's action against ragging of dead first-year student pending even after a year

A year has passed, but the JU authorities are yet to take actions on the identified students who had ragged the first-year student, according to reports in a local English daily.

The father of the deceased has said the university has only issued show-cause notice to the identified students.

He told The Telegraph, "JU show-caused the students implicated in the committee report, that too only after the education minister Bratya Basu in late July said he would speak to the JU authorities about the inaction.

"We don’t know when JU will announce the punishment and we will get justice."

JU interim Vice-Chancellor Bhaskar Gupta said the university is waiting for the reply to the show-cause letters.

Last year, Swarnodip Kundu, 18, fell fatally from the hostel's second floor on the JU campus. He succumbed to multiple wounds at a nearby city hospital.

Kundu, a resident of Bogulia in Nadia district, was a first-year student in the Bengali Honours stream. He died after allegedly falling from the second-floor balcony of his hostel though mystery still shrounds over what really happened that day.

According to the FIR, the teenager fell off the balcony and died during treatment at KPC Medical College.

Kundu’s parents and friends had alleged that he had been a victim of ragging.

"The show cause should have been wrapped up much earlier... As the university is taking time to act, complaints of harassment of students keep emerging from the same hostel. A postgraduate first-year student had to quit the hostel recently," the father told the daily.