Kalyani, Feb. 26: A pall of gloom has descended over the College of Medicine and JNM Hospital in Kalyani following the grim discovery of a final-year MBBS student’s decomposed body inside his hostel room on Thursday afternoon. Pulok Halder, a 24-year-old resident of Dhamua in South 24 Parganas, had reportedly been incommunicado for five days, leading his peers to believe he was deeply immersed in studies for the upcoming final examinations scheduled to begin on March 5.
The silence was only broken when junior students alerted authorities to a foul smell emanating from his locked ground-floor room, prompting a police intervention that revealed the student lying dead on his bed with visible bleeding from the head.
The local police have registered a suo moto case of unnatural death as they await post-mortem results to determine the exact cause of the tragedy. While investigators
have not ruled out suicide, the absence of a suicide note and the advanced state of decomposition—estimated by a senior doctor to indicate death occurred at least 48 hours prior—have added layers of mystery to the case. College records indicate that Halder, remembered by friends as a popular film buff, last accessed the hostel canteen on February 20, suggesting he had remained isolated without food for nearly a week before his body was found.
This incident has ignited a wave of frustration among the student body, who pointed to a systemic lack of alertness and a void in security infrastructure, specifically noting the absence of CCTV cameras within the hostel premises. Many questioned how a student could go missing from communal spaces for five days without a welfare check from the administration. Despite these allegations of negligence, College Principal Manidip Pal maintained that Halder had appeared to be in a normal mood during their last interaction, stating that it is currently too early to draw conclusions while the formal investigation into the circumstances of his death continues.