The nominee of Prime Minister and Chancellor Narendra Modi in the executive council, Dulal Chandra Ghosh, on Tuesday led around 100 retired teachers and staff of Visva-Bharati, to protest in front of the varsity’s central office against the varsity administration’s decision to scrap free medical consultation at the university hospital in Santiniketan.
Ghosh, also the president of the Visva-Bharati Pensioners’ Association, has written to the Prime Minister’s Office, requesting him to intervene and make the varsity administration reconsider.
“Pensioners have been getting healthcare services at the hospital since the time of Rabindranath Tagore. Ever since vice-chancellor Bidyut Chakrabarty came here, he had been saying we will not be able to consult doctors at the hospital for free as the central government provides us Rs 1,000 a month as medical allowance. The varsity administration stopped the service since July 2020,” said Ghosh.
Asked why he led the protest against the VC despite being a nominee of the Prime Minister in the varsity’s executive council, Ghosh said: “Look at the faces of these elderly people deprived of consulting doctors at the hospital. The VC told us that we have consumed Rs 1.20 crore by getting free health services from the varsity hospital. It is humiliation for pensioners.”
Some varsity teachers said that things had come to such a pass that the Chancellor’s nominee had to protest.
Visva-Bharati PRO Anirban Sircar issued a press release claiming that the varsity took the decision as “CAG has raised questions as to how pensioners could get free health service and Rs 1,000 allowance for health at a time”.
A varsity official countered that had the administration wanted, the CAG could have been told that only consultation was free for pensioners and not medicines.
The hospital was set up during Tagore’s lifetime to treat varsity staff and residents because healthcare services were very poor in Birbhum. Sources said in the 1950s the hospital was named after William Winstanley Pearson (1881-1923), the Cambridge graduate who had joined Santiniketan as a teacher in 1914.