Calcutta, Nov. 3: Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and health minister Surjya Kanta Mishra should not be held responsible for the blood test kit scam, Calcutta High Court held today .

The division bench of Chief Justice V.S. Sirpurkar and Justice N. Patheriya asked petitioner Tapas Kumar Sengupta to expunge their names from his list of respondents. “They should not be made responsible for the incident.”

Sengupta, a Salt Lake resident whose 18-year-old son is a thalassaemia patient and undergoes regular blood transfusion, had demanded the chief minister’s resignation in the wake of the scandal.

The high court admitted the petition to prevent donation by those who received blood examined with faulty kits.

The government will have to file an affidavit stating the steps taken to tackle the situation and to make special arrangements to test blood samples before all collection and transfusion procedures.

Patients were given the liberty to demand compensation if they fell ill following blood transfusion at both government and private facilities.

The court declined to accept Sengupta’s demand for a list of people who underwent blood transfusion between May 2005 and October 2006.