Shame!

The IIT Kharagpur campus newspaper writes on the incident - widely reported (mostly negatively) in the papers today - following the death of a student. If the details of the story are correct, this is more than negligence, it's downright criminal. Paperwork for an ambulance to transport a critical head-injury case? A satire on Indian bureaucracy would be hard-pressed to come up with a better story.

Incidentally, the same newspaper claims it was allegedly shut down earlier by the Institute for publishing an expose on the sad state of the BC Roy hospital.

Here is another student blog article about the incident.

If IIT-ans resort to (or have to resort to) this sort of stuff to get basic accountability for such a serious incident (in spite of previous warnings about the hospital, if the campus newspaper article is to be believed), what hope remains for the rest of the country?

If there is another side to the story, that must be heard. If there isn't, well, there's nothing much to be said, is there?

Update: apparently, Justice U C Banerjee (yes, the selfsame Godhra-was-an-accident man) has been appointed as the one-man enquiry commission into the incident. Smells like a cover-up is in the works, doesn't it?

The Hatter does not condone destruction of property or physical coercion as happened in this case. However culpable the institute authorities were, however grossly negligent they may have been, violence against their person or property is not justified. I do not want to judge the students who reacted in perhaps the only way they could, but the slippery slope from there ends at Mamta Banerjee. Depressing, but true.