Kolkata: Health minister Sharadwat Mukherjee said demoting Riyal Das, daughter of orthopaedic surgeon S P Das, from an assistant professor’s post to a medical officer and shifting her from the special medical education department to general health services were the right decisions as she did not possess the qualifications.Riyal had been an assistant professor at the Institute of Psychiatry since Dec 2020.TOI on Thursday reported the health department’s order, asking Riyal to serve as a medical officer with a rider that the department would recover the overdrawn salary from her as she was entitled allowance and pay only as a medical officer and not an assistant professor. “She is sent to the place where she was actually supposed to be. She does not have any postgraduate degree. How can she be a medical teacher? The minimum requirement for being a medical teacher is a postgraduate degree. She got in without a degree. Her father has a big degree—he was an MD. As her father was an MD, she also became an MD. This is exactly how the health department functioned,” said Mukherjee on Thursday.S P Das’s name cropped up during the RG Kar protest with the medical community naming him as the kingpin of the North Bengal lobby who controlled recruitment, posting and transfer of doctors while promoting threat culture in medical college campuses.Riyal maintained that her recruitment was done after due process and she held an MS degree in global health from a university in the US, along with a fellowship in fields, like preventive psychiatrist and epidemiology.
