Senior IPS officer Manoj Kumar Verma
Credit: X/@ANI
Kolkata: The West Bengal government on Tuesday replaced Vineet Goyal with Manoj Verma as the commissioner of Kolkata Police as Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had agreed during a meeting with the junior doctors protesting against the rape and murder of a young doctor at a hospital in Kolkata.
The state’s Trinamool Congress government also replaced Abhishek Gupta, Deputy Commissioner of Police (North), with Dipak Sarkar. The state government also removed two senior officials of the Department of Health and Family Welfare.
Though the state government implemented the promises the chief minister made during her meeting with the protesting junior doctors, the agitating medics did not make it clear till late in the evening on Tuesday when they would end the sit-in demonstration in front of the Swasthya Bhavan – the headquarters of the Department of Health and Family Welfare of the state government – in Kolkata and when they would call off the cease work stir and return to providing medical care to the patients.\
The protesting junior doctors started a meeting at the venue of the sit-in demonstration in the evening on Tuesday but did not announce any decision to call off their stir.
Goyal was appointed as the Additional Director General of the Special Task Force of Police, while Gupta was reassigned as the Commanding Officer of the Second Battalion of the Eastern Frontier Rifles.
The protesting junior doctors have been demanding the removal of Goyal and Gupta for their alleged failure to prevent cover-up attempts and destruction of evidence after the body of the young doctor was found raped and murdered inside the seminar room of the Department of Chest Medicine of the R G Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata.
They were also demanding the removal of the senior officials of the Department of Health and Family Welfare of the state government in view of the allegations of rampant corruption in the state’s public healthcare sector.
Banerjee on Monday had a meeting with the representatives of the protesting junior doctors and accepted most of their demands, urging them to return to work.