Ahmedabad:
It was 1 am on a weeknight in the girl's hostel at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. Suddenly, a naked man appeared on the second floor of the girls hostel.
He encountered a girl in the corridor and molested her for almost five minutes. When she shouted for help, he bit her, then disappeared.
''She was fetching water from the cooler when this unidentified man attacked her from behind. When she shouted for help, he jumped over the boundary wall and escaped,'' says the registrar, Vijay Deshmukh.
The main entrance to NID, one of the country's most prestigious institutes, has round-the-clock security. There are also meant to be guards on campus, but students allege they rarely see security personnel on duty.
The attacker who molested the student on Tuesday is believed to be in his mid-20s.
Students aren't willing to be interviewed on camera but they say that last month, they saw a nude man on campus who ran away when he saw them. The students say they alerted college officials to the possibility of a trespasser.
The area behind the girls' hostel is usually deserted. Inadequate lighting turns the boundary wall in the area into a possible entry point that's easy to breach. Beyond the wall lie a series of slums, students suspect the trespasser lives there.
"We have not only asked for adequate lighting in the deserted area, but have also deployed night patrols,'' says V R Toliya, Ahmedabad's Assistant Commissioner of Police.
There are about 250 girls in the NID who live in the college hostel. After sunset, now, they say they avoid leaving the hostel.