Mamata's New Year resolution: we will learn from our mistakes

Calcutta, Apr 15 (PTI): West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Monday said that her government might have committed 'two or three' mistakes in the past two years, but would learn from them in the Bengali New Year. "In the last two years, there have been hundreds of examples of development in Bengal. We also may have made two or three mistakes. But we will learn from our mistakes in the New Year," Trinamul Congress MP Derek O'Brien said quoting the chief minister whom he met at her residence on Bengali New Year's day. Speaking about Presidency University, which saw the vandalising of the Baker Laboratory on April 10 by people bearing Trinamul Congress flags, he said, "On behalf of Mamata Banerjee, let me convey that Presidency is a center for academics and a centre of excellence. And, in the last two years this has been the direction." He said that it was the Trinamul Congress chief who did not allow a Trinamul unit at the university even though the party ran 360 out of the 425 college unions in West Bengal. University Vice-Chancellor Malabika Sarkar had said that those who vandalised various departments carried TMC flags. Governor M K Narayanan had said that those who ransacked the institution should be treated like 'criminals'. The vandalism took place a day after Mamata was heckled and finance minister Amit Mitra manhandled in Delhi by the Students Federation of India over the death of its leader Sudipto Gupta in police custody in Calcutta on April 2. The chief minister had subsequently fallen ill and had been admitted to the Belle Vue Clinic from where she was discharged on April 13 after being advised rest for two weeks.