Remembering Late Lakshmi Prasad Goswami

Remembering Late Lakshmi Prasad Goswami

Lakshmi Prasad Goswami was a well known me in the forties, the sixties and the seventies. He was a revolutiory freedom fighter, particularly well known for his underground activities during the Quit India Movement which proved to be such a headache to the British that the colonial government declared a public reward of Rs. 10,000 for his capture - dead or alive.

A first class graduate in Law (1953) from Allahabad University; he was a lawyer by profession and also pursued his political interests.

In the early sixties, Late Goswami became an MLA from Praja Socialist Party and also the Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly. In the mid sixties, he became the minister of Agriculture in the Bimala Prasad Chaliha cabinet and later the minister of Revenue in the Mahendra Mohan Choudhury ministry.

In 1970, he, surprisingly and unexpectedly, submitted his resigtion even after a charge of corruption against him was ruled to be false on the floor of the House. This act of his was compared by a then leading local newspaper with the resigtion of Late Lal Bahadur Shashtri when the latter, as the Union Railway minister, had handed in his papers owing moral responsibility for a rail mishap. It needs mention that though once a Revenue minister, Goswami had no other land or property, not even in Guwahati, except his homestead at gaon town and ancestral property at Kampur. When he passed away, he left behind a bank balance of Rs 7000 at SBI, gaon main branch.

Late Goswami was born in the year 1915 at Kampur, gaon and died at gaon in 1998. This year happens to be his birth centery year. A man of his greatness and sigl contributions surely deserves some sort of recognition, maybe in the form of some kind of public function from the side of the State government and/or the Freedom Fighters' Association and/or the APCC at least on his birth centery year.

We leave it to the authorities and the public to decide.

Shamsul Islam Bakshi,

G. R. B Road, Fauzdary Patty,

gaon, Assam - 782 001.

Gloomy picture of health department

What good can the people expect from a State government, the leader of which makes bombastic talk and hollow promises, while miserably failing to monitor the activities of his ministers leading malfunctioning departments? Among all the departments, if we cast a cursory view, we find that the minister in charge of our Health and Family Welfare department cuts a sorry figure. He was a miserable failure in his stint as Food and Civil Supply minister,too. A minister who can candidly concede in the Assembly that unless the Health department resorts to patch-up exercise by making doctors rush to a specific Medical college just to hoodwink the Medical Council of India, is perhaps enough to drive home the dismal state of affairs prevailing in the Medical Colleges in particular, and other health units in general. How long this hoodwinking will continue to befool the Medical Council of India, it is for the Chief Minister to clarify. He must shun the habit of playing with the lives of the people. As conceded by the minister himself in the Assembly, there are quite a good number of vacancies of doctors and nurses in the five Medical colleges of Assam, of which the highest number of vacancies are there in the Assam Medical College and Hospital, Dibrugarh, an institution that can boast of being one of the oldest Medical colleges of Asia. By meting out this sort of discrimition to AMCH, Dibrugarh, what does the Chief Minister want to imply? We pray that good sense prevails upon him to at least devote some of his time to the 'unhealthy' Health sector!

Ashok Bordoloi,

Dibrugarh.