Bhubaneswar: Former Odisha Youth Congress president Sangram Keshari Jena succumbed to post-COVID complications at a hospital in Hyderabad, on Thursday morning.
“Sangram passed away following a massive stroke,” his younger brother Manoj told the media.
He was 44 and survived by his wife and two children.
Sangram, the elder son of former Minister and ex-president of Odisha Pradesh Congress Committee Jayadev Jena, was airlifted to the private healthcare facility in Hyderabad on May 23 after his condition deteriorated due to COVID-19 related complications. He was shifted outside the state as ECMO treatment could not be made available to him at a private facility here, where he was on the ventilator for over three weeks after testing positive for COVID.
Sangram was a dynamic youth leader and rose from students’ politics. He was general secretary, BJB College Students’ Union, in 1996-97. He unsuccessfully contested for the post of president of Utkal University Students’ Union in 1998-99 but went on to emerge as a prominent student and youth leader of the state and held different responsibilities in the Congress and its frontal organisations. In 2014, he also unsuccessfully fought the elections for Bhadrak Lok Sabha constituency on a Congress ticket.