Agitating faculty members, alumni and students of IIT Kharagpur on Friday brought their demand for appointment of a regular director to Delhi.
At a press conference here, the alumni, staff and students of the 62-year-old institution said they planned to organise protests against the situation on Saturday in Delhi, Bangalore and Kolkata. Over 400 of them sat on hunger strike in the campus premises on July 17.
The agitating staff said IIT Kharagpur had been without a head for over a year now, even though a selection committee constituted by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD) had selected Partha Pratim Chakrabarti for the position in 2012. Chakrabarti, a President’s gold medallist, has not been allowed to assume office without the mandatory clearance from the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC). Chakrabarti, along with two other senior professors of the institution, is suspected to be involved in what has come to be known as the coalnet scam.
The coalnet project was awarded to IIT Kharagpur by Coal India Ltd in 2001 for developing a software, ‘Coalnet’, to facilitate information sharing between the Ministry of Coal, Coal India Ltd and its subsidiary.
However, the project suffered multiple delays, rising costs and also some suspected irregularities. The Central Bureau of Investigation had found that the three professors had manipulated records.
However, members of the alumni, staff and students are backing Chakrabarti and have sought immediate clearance from the CVC. They claimed that the IIT Kharagpur board of governors, which cleared him of any wrong-doing, was a competent authority to make such an assessment.
On Thursday, HRD Minister, Pallam Raju, had said all steps would be taken to ensure that normalcy returned soon in the campus.
He told presspersons that the HRD Ministry was waiting for a report from the CVC on the selected director. Raju is slated to visit the campus on July 27 to attend the convocation function, and sources in the Ministry said a director was expected to be in place before that.
The post of the director fell vacant on June 30, 2012, and there has been no permanent appointment to the post as yet.
The Bangalore Chapter of IIT-Kharagpur Alumni Association will hold a day-long protest on July 20 (Satudary) to register its protest over IIT Kharagpur remaining without a director for over a year now.
According to Utkal Mohanty, President, IIT-Kharagpur Alumni Association, Bangalore, "The march has been convened to register the association’s protest.”
As part of the agitation, alumni of the institution would hold a peaceful rally from Bal Bhavan, Cubbon Park to Freedom Park, Gandhinagar in Bangalore.