Bihar Minister Kapil Deo Kamat of Janata Dal-United (JD-U) died at the Indian Institute of Medical Sciences in Patna early Friday morning from the coronavirus. He is the second minister in Nitish Kumar’s cabinet to succumb to Covid-19 this week.
Kamat, 70, was admitted to AIIMS, Patna on October 1 and had been on respiratory support for the past week. He passed away at 1.50am on Friday, said Dr. Sanjeev Kumar, Covid-19 node officer at AIIMS-Patna.
“He suffered from chronic kidney failure. The minister’s condition began to deteriorate a week ago, when he was administered inotropic drugs to maintain blood pressure. He was on alternate days of hemodialysis, ”Dr. Kumar said.
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Bihar Governor Phagu Chauhan, Prime Minister Nitish Kumar, and several other leaders mourned Kamat’s death.
Earlier this week, the minister of the backward classes and the department of social welfare of the extremely backward classes, Vinod Singh of BJP, died after suffering a brain hemorrhage in Delhi, days after recovering from the Covid-19 infection. . Previously, Bihar BJP MLC Sunil Kumar Singh, 69, died from the Covid pandemic at AIIMS-Patna in July.
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Kamat entered active politics in 1980 when he campaigned for Congressional candidate Mahendra Narayan Jha in the Babubarhi assembly seat in Madhubani district before they fell apart. He unsuccessfully contested Babubarhi’s 1985 assembly elections as an independent candidate before entering the Rashtriya Janata Dal and eventually joining the JD (U).
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He contested the October 2005 legislative assembly elections as a JD (U) candidate from the Babubarhi seat and won. He competed again in 2010 from the same constituency, but lost to RJD’s Uma Kant Yadav. In the 2015 assembly elections, he won from the Babubarhi seat and was appointed minister of the Panchayati Raj department.
As many as 972 deaths have been reported in the state of more than 2 lakh of Covid-19 cases reported as of Thursday. With 1.88,802 people recovered, the recovery rate from the disease stood at 94.01% in the state.
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