Jaipur coaching centres continue to flout safety norms, say students

Days after 10 students fainted after an alleged mysterious gas leak from the air conditioner into one of the classrooms of a coaching centre in Jaipur's Gopalpura, one of the 300 students who were present on that day recalled that though the ACs and windows were shut due to cold weather conditions, the incident "happened in a blink of my eye".

- Senjuti Sengupta

JAIPUR:

"The classroom was swarming with people that evening. I could barely even see those students when they fainted. It all happened in a blink of my eye," said a student on condition of anonymity.

The batch comprised 594 students, of which around 300 were present on the day of the mishap. "We have been preparing for a teachers' recruitment exam in this coaching centre for the last two months. Our batch is probably the largest one in the institute. We sit in a huge hall with 10 to 15 windows and eight to nine ACs. However, all windows and the ACs were shut on that day due to cold when that incident happened," he said.

Mysterious gas leakage in coaching centre
At around 8 pm on December 15, in the middle of session some students started screaming that something had happened at the middle space of the room.

"When someone started screaming suddenly I looked behind and saw that a student had fallen unconscious. Our teacher immediately asked everyone to leave the room. When we were leaving, some other students also fainted creating a panic across the institute. Some of the students who were sitting in the middle bench said that they reported a weird smell but most of us didn't smell anything," the student quoted above recalled.

Meanwhile, the police and the local municipality officials had immediately arrived and all victims including eight girls were rushed to the hospital. Sodala ACP, Yogesh Chaudhary said, "The coaching centre is located at the second floor of a premium apartment in Jaipur's Mahesh Nagar. On December 15, the apartment was probably filled with a toxic gas which was leaking from an air conditioner. All students were discharged in the next few days. The doctors could not identify the exact reason of their sudden suffocation."