Mamata Banerjee promises to learn from past mistakes on Bengali New Year

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Monday said that her government might have committed '2 or 3' mistakes in the past two years, but would learn from them in the New Year.

"In the last 2 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," Trinamool 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 Trinamool 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 Trinamool Congress chief who did not allow a Trinamool 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 Banerjee was heckled and finance minister Amit Mitra manhandled in Delhi by the SFI over the death of its leader Sudipto Gupta in police custody in Kolkata 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.