Bengal guv approaches ISRO chief and Hyd base hi-tech firm to suggest methods to combat ragging

Kolkata, Aug 25 : West Bengal Governor CV Ananda Bose has approached ISRO Chairman S Somnath and sought his help to identify a hi-tech method to combat the alleged ragging in the university campus across the state, which already took a life of teenager at the famed Jadavpur University (JU) in the city.

” CV Ananda Bose, Governor of West Bengal and Chancellor of Universities contacted the Chairman of ISRO for identification of appropriate technology to effectively contain and eliminate the menace of ragging on the university campuses,” a Raj Bhawan statement said.

The statement was released from the governor’s house on Thursday night.

Governor CV Ananda Bose, who this morning is visiting Malda district in the state to meet the kin and grieving relatives of those 24 workers killed after an under-construction railway bridge collapsed on them, was killed in Mizoram this week.

The Raj Bhawan also contacted a high-tech company in Hyderabad and sought to know how to check ragging in universities.

The West Bengal Governor, by virtue of his post, is the chancellor or acharya of all the state government-owned universities across the state.

‘They are trying to develop an appropriate technology solution using multiple sources such as video analytics, image matching, automatic target recognition, and remote sensing,” the governor said in the statement.

About his approach to checking ragging, which has become a topic in educational institutions as well as in political circles.

State Education Minister Bratya Basu has accused the governor of being 100 per cent responsible for the current chaotic situation on the JU campus.

Basu told the state legislative assembly that the governor picked up the vice chancellor at the state universities on his own without consultation with the state government.

On August 10, an 18-year-old undergraduate student died after falling from the 2nd floor of a campus hotel, resulting in private hospitalisation. The Jadavpur University had a vice chancellor on the day.

The VC resigned on August 9, and the present VC, Buddadeb Sau, a mathematics faculty member, took over as officiating VC on August 19. The teenage student, from a rural background, died on his third day on the campus.

The state government had moved to the Supreme Court against the governor’s appointment methods, which the apex court maintains status and to hear the same after two weeks.