On Tuesday night, a girl was attacked by an unidentified man as she was going to fetch water from a cooler on the second floor of the girls’ hostel. The man was naked and had sneaked into the campus breaching the security at the gates as well as inside the campus.
When the girl shouted for help, he bit her and disappeared. The incident has sparked fear among the girls who now prefer not to leave their hostel after sunset. There are about 260 girl students staying in the NID hostel. “She was fetching water from the cooler when the unidentified man attacked her from behind. When she shouted for help, he jumped over the boundary wall and escaped,” said the NID registrar Vijaya Deshmukh.
The institute authorities, without revealing the girl’s identity, said she was a third-year undergraduate student of film and video and hailed from Orissa. She has been admitted to a private hospital here.
This is the second such incident to have happened on the NID campus in the last one month, students said. “The first time it happened, the outsider was completely nude. Those who saw him raised an alarm and he fled. But the latest molestation attempt has left us stunned,” said a student.
According to the students, though there are securitymen taking turns to man the main entrance to the NID and its premises, there is hardly any guard around the hostel.
Tuesday’s incident has forced the institute to intensify patrolling around the campus, for which the help of the local police has been sought.
The NID was in the news recently after a former student complained that a teacher had conducted experiments with nudity on students as part of an ongoing research. In an e-mail, Saurabh Kumar, a December 2009 pass-out, accused a senior faculty member of forcing students to undress before each other “to enhance their creativity”.