Prasanta Sur

He died on 29 February 2008. As per his wishes his body was donated for medical research to Nilratan Sarkar Medical College in Kolkata.

In 1998, he lost to Mamata Banerjee in the Calcutta South (Lok Sabha constituency).

Prasanta Sur was also a great success as a health minister of the LF government (1987–1996), and he especially turned his attention to the development of a rural health network while strengthening the government-run hospitals and research centres in the cities, large, and small.

Sur was urban development minister from 1977 till 1982. It was under him that the then Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority really got off the ground, becoming a prime agency for development.

Prasanta Sur was the urban development minister of the Left Front government from 1977 till 1982, it was under him that the then Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA, now KMDA), really got off the ground, becoming a prime agency for development from the moribund state it had been put in.

The UF government came to office and was gone before it could really dig itself in. Nevertheless, this was not the case at the Kolkata Municipal Corporation. There the Left won the civic polls, and stayed in office until 1972. Prasanta Sur had become the first Communist mayor of metropolis, and commenced the move that was aimed at reorienting the developmental drive of the civic body towards the mass of the people, especially the urban poor, and the refugees who had kept coming to the city and its surroundings, all the while.

Sur's father was Rai Saheb Nagendra Nath Sur, a member of the landed gentry of (erstwhile) east Pakistan. The Rai Saheb disowned him after Prasanta Sur joined the Communist movement in Kolkata. An obstinate and proud man, the Rai Saheb continued to live at his home in East Pakistan until he was assassinated by the Pakistani Army in 1971. He Was one of great leaders like Saroj Dutta, Jyoti Basu, Geeta Mukherjee and Hare Krishna Konar.

During the repression of the Communists in the late sixties Sur had to remain underground and was also in prison. In 1969 he became the first Communist Mayor of Kolkata.

In 1968, he entered assembly election scenario. He won the Tollygunge assembly seat successively in 1977, 1982, 1987 and 1991.

Prasanta Sur (Bengali: প্রশান্ত শূর; 1 January 1923 – 29 February 2008) was the convenor of the Kolkata district Left Front committee and became the first Left Front Mayor of Kolkata during 1969. A member of the state committee of Communist Party of India (Marxist), Sur was the urban development minister in the first Left Front government in 1977. Later, he also held key portfolios like health, refugee rehabilitation etc. He died on 29 February 2008, aged 85, after suffering from age-related problems.