By IANS,
Coimbatore : April 11 (IANS) A 20-year-old management student has been left partially blinded after he was allegedly ragged by his seniors here, police said Saturday.
According to a complaint by P. Akhil Dev, a first year BBA student from Thiruvananthapuram, he suffered serious injuries on his jaw, nose and eyes after being ragged by five senior students March 7 for not giving them Rs.3,000 as “protection money”.
Dev, who is the son of Thiruvananthapuram-based film scriptwriter Sunil Parmeswaran, has named Aswin, Ajmal, Arjun, Michael and Sameer – all from Kerala, as the seniors who manhandled him and another roommate, Tony. Tony escaped with minor injuries.
Cases have been registered against the five suspects under various sections of the Indian Penal Code for rioting (147), causing grievous hurt (323), criminal assault on person(s) (355) and criminal intimidation (505) besides the Tamil Nadu Prohibition of Ragging Act 1997, a police official said. All five are absconding.
The authorities at the P.S.G. college have refused to divulge names of the suspects but said they have been suspended.
Despite a Supreme Court directive to colleges to curb ragging, the scourge that most recently caused the death of a medical student in Himachal Pradesh and led another to attempt suicide in Andhra Pradesh, continues to terrorise hundreds across the country.
In February this year, taking serious note of an alarming rise in ragging incidents in educational institutions across the country, the Supreme Court accepted the recommendations of the K.R. Raghavan Committee to curb the menace.