Police arrest IIT Guwahati Dean for alleged rape

Ghosal had been allegedly harassing the woman – whose husband too is a non-teaching staff of IIT Guwahati – for quite sometime, with the woman finally finding her way to the Women Police Station in the city to lodge an FIR. While Ghosal was picked up by the police on Monday itself he was formally arrested on Tuesday under Section 376(2)(b) of the IPC, the City SSP confirmed.

Ghosal, who had joined IIT Guwahati in 2003, had earlier served as a professor in BITS, Pilani. Elevated to the HoD of Chemical Engineering in 2005, he was later also appointed Dean of Academic Affairs in 2012. The authorities meanwhile have placed him under suspension following his arrest. It was however not known why the woman did not lodge a complaint with the Internal Complaints Committee and chose to go directly to the police.

Sources said Ghosal, who lives on the IIT campus in North Guwahati (across the Brahmaputra from the city) with his son, had sensed trouble on Monday itself and informed some of his colleagues by e-mail that he would not be in the campus from Monday afternoon for two or three days. By the time the police had arrived on the campus looking for him, Ghosal had reportedly left hiring a taxi through the transportation section.

The police however followed him after contacting the taxi driver, and found him walking hurriedly on the Brahmaputra bridge after the vehicle was stuck in the regular afternoon traffic jam. The police reportedly apprehended him from there and took him to the Women Police Station in the city where he was finally arrested.

This is the second instance in recent times where an IIT-G professor faced allegations of sexual harassment. In September 2013, a professor was placed under suspension for allegedly harassing a female student through “unwarranted” messages sent through SMS. The professor however was absolved of the charges and was later reinstated after the complainant reportedly could not substantiate her allegations against him.

IIT Guwahati incidentally is the only Indian institution to have made its way to the world’s top 100 university rankings when ‘Times Higher Education’ magazine placed it in the list of “100 Under-50 institutions in May this year. It was for the first time that any Indian institution had found a rank among the list of top 100 institutions that are less than 50 years old.