The Jadavpur University on Wednesday, December 7 formed an eight-member committee to investigate the abuse of a senior professor allegedly by a non-teaching staffer, officials said.

The committee, comprising four deans and four professors, will examine the incident in which Professor Swapan Kumar Bhattacharya, the Head of the Chemistry Department, was allegedly verbally abused by a Group D staffer when he asked him to unlock the doors of a classroom last week, they said, as stated in a report by PTI.

"The panel, which will submit its report by the end of this month, will further investigate what triggered the incident, whether the staffer disobeyed the professor and also the role of others present at the spot," an official said. Around a hundred faculty members of the Science, Engineering and Arts departments demonstrated outside the office of Registrar Snehamanju Basu, demanding action against the non-teaching staffer.

The aforementioned incident came to the fore after the university’s fifth-year students from the Architecture Department unanimously filed a complaint in September against one of their professors, Dr Shivashish Bose, for allegedly sexually harassing and misbehaving with female students over the years