DEATH ON THE CAMPUS

AN ALARMING RISE IN SUICIDES BY IIT STUDENTS FORCES INTROSPECTION ON THE PRESSURES OF HIGHER EDUCATION

- KAUSHIK DEKA

On April 21, Kedar Suresh Chougule, a secondyear B.Tech. student of Chemical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, was found hanging in his hostel room. Ironically, his death came three days after Dharmendra Pradhan, the Union minister of education, directed the prestigious engineering institutes to provide robust mental health support for students. Pradhan was addressing the 55th meeting of the IIT Council, the highest decision-making body for the institutes, at Bhubaneswar. Chougule’s was the sixth suicide on IIT campuses in the first four months of 2023. Three other students had taken their lives in IIT Madras, while another two died by suicide on the IIT Bombay and IIT Guwahati campuses during the same period.

“Academic stress, family and personal reasons and mental health issues are some of the reasons for such suicides,” Subhas Sarkar, the Union minister of state for education, told Parliament on March 27. His statement came while disclosing a grim statistic: 33 students had died by suicide on IIT campuses since 2018. With two more added to this horrific tally in April, this number was one higher than the 34 students in the country’s 23 IITs who died by suicide in the eight years between 2014 and 2021, another revelation that came on the floor of Parliament on December 20, 2021. And this is excluding the unsuccessful suicide attempts. On February 13, a first-year B.Tech. student attempted to kill himself at IIT Madras, the very day that Stephen Sunny, a second-year MS research scholar in Electrical Engineering, ended his life in his hostel room.