As 40-year-old primary school teacher, Indrajit Debnath, committed suicide in Alipurduar town today, local people who knew him said he may have taken the extreme step as he had lost huge sums of money in betting during the recently-concluded ICC Cricket World Cup.

Alipurduar police recovered the body of the teacher from railway tracks in between Alipurduar Court and Alipurduar Junction, it is learnt. Along with the local people, the Railway Protection Force (RPF) also informed the police that a man had been hit by a train, police sources said. Debnath was a primary school teacher at the Tapsikhata-2 BFP School. He is survived by his wife and a daughter.

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A pall of gloom descended on the Beltala area in Ward-8 under the Alipurduar municipality where Debnath lived. “The teacher was very popular among the students in and outside the town, and a large number of students from classes V-XII came to him for private tuitions,” local sources said. “The youth was accustomed to betting in cricket tournaments,” local sources added. According to some local people, he had recently lost a huge sum of money when the Indian team was defeated in the semi-final by New Zealand in the World Cup. It is learnt that the youth had borrowed money from several persons in the town and that he had been facing the wrath of the lenders.

“Local people informed us of the death, while the Railway authorities also informed us that a train had hit a youth there. We reached the spot and recovered the dead body and sent it to the Alipurduar district hospital for post-mortem. The cause of the death is a matter of investigation,” said the Inspector in-charge of the Alipurduar police station, Rabin Thapa.

“We learnt that the teacher had borrowed a huge amount of money from many people in the town. Some also said that the youth was accustomed to cricket betting,” said a neighbour of the deceased, Subrata Biswas.