IIT Kharagpur is shifting staff and infrastructure from the on-campus Bidhan Chandra Roy Technology Hospital to the new Syama Prasad Mookerjee Superspeciality Hospital at Balarampur, 4km away, drawing fire from teachers.

While the institute claims the objective is “to optimally utilise” the facilities, the critics say the move is a sleight of hand — meant to create the impression of strengthening a new facility when all that is being done is essentially a relocation.

A professor said the campus had at least 17,000 students and 10,000 other residents. “How will the institute ensure transport to Balarampur for so many people?”

The institute has set up a campus conveyance service of three-wheelers (or “totos”) for travel between the hospitals, and will bear the expenses, an IIT media release said on Saturday. It did not say how many three-wheelers would be part of the service.

An office order of December 12 said all IPD (in-patient department) and OPD (outpatient department) services, “except a skeleton facility”, would by December 23 be shifted to the new facility, named after the founder of the Jana Sangh, the BJP’s precursor.

So will be OT (operation theatre) services, including the autoclave machine and operating table, the entire pathology, biochemistry and microbiology setups “including all useful equipment”.

The medical officers and visiting consultants as well as all kinds of machines, computers, other equipment, furniture and materials are to be shifted, a process that sources said had already begun.

Only sample collection, pharmacy services and emergency primary care by nursing assistants – as well as the mortuary — will be available at the on-campus hospital, named after Bidhan Chandra Roy, the former chief minister who had allotted the land for the establishment of the country’s first IIT.

The B.C. Roy technology hospital was developed on the campus a few years after the establishment of IIT Kharagpur in 1951.

The multispeciality hospital, too, was initially named after B.C. Roy, who had allotted the Balarampur plot, too, to the IIT.

Outrage had greeted the first attempt, nearly four years ago, to rename the yet-to-be-operational B.C. Roy Multi Speciality Medical Research Centre in Balarampur after Mookerjee.

At the IIT’s 66th convocation on February 23, 2021, institute director V.K. Tewari had announced that Prime Minister Narendra Modi — the chief guest — would virtually inaugurate the Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee Institute of Medical Sciences and Research. The plan was shelved after an outcry from alumni and others.

That controversy came just before the 2021 Assembly elections, which witnessed an “outsider versus Bengali culture” debate amid allegations that the BJP was disrespecting Bengal’s icons from Vidyasagar to Tagore and Birsa Munda.

Even on Saturday, an IIT professor, referring to the facility shift, said: “It’s an attempt to erase the memory of someone considered a founder of the institute.”

This newspaper made four calls to Tewari’s mobile number on Saturday but he did not take them. Nor did text messages and emails to the director bring any response.

Calls and text messages to the IIT registrar, Capt. Amit Jain, too went unanswered.

After the outcry of February 2021, IIT authorities towards the end of the year split the B.C. Roy Centre at Balarampur in two — a superspeciality hospital named after Mookerjee and a medical college named after Roy. The medical college has not yet come up.

The foundation stone for the Balarampur hospital had been laid by then President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam in 2007, said retired IIT professor Ajay Roy, who was then the head of the School of Medical Science and Technology at IIT Kharagpur.

The IIT authorities’ decision for the relocation came after the teachers’ association wrote to the Union education ministry on September 20 accusing Tewari of failing to start the superspeciality hospital during his five-year tenure.

The teachers have now written to the chairman of the institute’s board of governors seeking his intervention so the shift can be put on hold.

“As this shift is going to be a major disruption for the campus community including the students, we are appalled that none of the recognised bodies representing teachers, staff, officers or students have ever been consulted, although there exists a committee called Hospital Management Committee,” the letter says.

In Saturday’s release, the institute said: “In order to optimally utilise the capacity of both the hospital(s) including state-of-the-art infrastructure and modern healthcare facilities for patients, the staff and infrastructure at BCRTH will be relocated to SPMSH as per directives of the Ministry of Education.”

It added: “In order to provide more specialised treatment to both the inside and outside community with enhanced infrastructural support and to meet the rising challenges of medical facilities in the neighbourhood community, this decision has been taken.”