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Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati on Sunday formed a high-level team to probe incidents of ragging in colleges, bring the guilty to book and consider the need for more stringent laws to prevent its recurrence.
"The four-member inquiry committee will suggest whether the existing laws are enough to curb this malpractice or a new law is required to tackle it," she said in a statement.
The move followed suicide by a first year engineering student, who was allegedly ragged and sexually abused.
Nineteen-year-old Anoop Kapoor, a student of Lucknow's Institute of Engineering and Technology, was allegedly beaten and sodomized by a group of seniors last week.
Unable to bear the humiliation, Anoop rushed to his home in Kanpur.
"Anoop had suffered severe trauma and ever since he reached Kanpur on September 10, he kept on saying that he would not want to go back to IET," according to his father Paras Nath Kapoor.
IET Director A K Khare said he had suspended five students suspected to be involved in the incident.
In a letter to the IET director, Kapoor said: "I have lost my young son, but for heaven's sake please do something concrete to prevent similar tragedies in future."
"The trouble is that the culprits, more often than not managed to get away, either because of their clout or on account of judicial intervention," a senior faculty member remarked.
Not very long ago, serious cases of ragging were reported from Lucknow's famous King George's Medical College. Cases of physical abuse of female students were also reported from other medical colleges.
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