IIT suicides reveal poisonous combine of educational stress, official apathy and discrimination

Online Desk

V Vaipu Pushpak Sree Sai, 20, a third-year B Tech scholar from IIT Madras, died by suicide on March 14 in his hostel room. This was the second such incident on the campus in a single month. Stephen Sunny, an MS Research Scholar, had died by suicide on February 13. A day earlier, a first-year scholar Darshan Solanki had died by suicide on the IIT Mumbai campus. 

In December 2021, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan had knowledgeable the Lok Sabha that 122 college students of such institutes (together with IITs, IIMs, NITs, NITIEs and Central Universities) had died by suicide throughout 2014-21. Six college students, three every from IITs and the National Institute of Technology, died by suicide in 2023. Eight IIT college students died by suicide in 2022, 4 in 2021 and three in 2020.

Why has this been taking place?

“One of the main reasons students take this extreme decision is academic pressure. Some of it is self-inflicted but a good part of it comes from professors and the administration collectively turning a blind eye to a lot of things,” says Vikram*, a fourth-year scholar of the Integrated MA program in English research at IIT. 

“For example, we have an 85% attendance rule. If you fail to meet this requirement, you have to repeat the course. It is challenging even for people with really good mental health. And professors are arbitrary in applying the rule. Some professors care, some don’t and some calculate it to the decimal level. Some classes have QR codes that you have to scan to get your attendance marked, while in other classes at least you can put in proxy (ask someone to mark it for you),” Vikram tells The New Indian Express.  

Throwing mild on tutorial life at IIT, Mritunjay Shukla, a fourth-year scholar in engineering design and knowledge sciences, tells TNIE, “You come to IIT and after a seven-day orientation, your classes start and you have to get back to quizzes, midterms and exams.”

IIT Madras has an ‘intense, high-pressure setting’ the place college students are unhealthily aggressive, says Vikram, including, “If you take all the over-achievers from various schools and put them in one place, there are bound to be conflicts.” 

“IITs have a relative-grading system. There is no absolute grading, rather the professors decide the students’ ranks based on how the class has performed. One student’s CGPA is dependent on how the rest of the class performs. This leads to students competing with each other in unhealthy ways, like withholding notes. Some of my friends are in the Electrical Engineering (EE) Department and some of them are in Engineering Physics (EP). They had a common subject in EE and the students, collectively, did not tell the EP students where the class was. We don’t have the space to say we don’t care because, at a certain level, we do have to care. I am glad I am not in any of these classes and I am in humanities. It is comparatively better than engineering,” Vikram says. 
 
IIT administrations throughout India have arrange counselling cells to assist college students take care of their psychological well being issues. However, these cells haven’t been performing at their full capability, say totally different sources. 

“The administration sets up counselling centres but it does not become accessible to students. Since there is a stigma about mental health problems among students, they have inhibitions in reaching out for help. Students get mocked by their peers if they talk about being depressed,” Shukla says. 

Criticising the IIT Madras administration’s negligence in the direction of college students’ psychological well being points, Vikram says, “The counselling cell is a joke. We have three full-time counsellors for ten thousand students and people who have gone to them say that they don’t have caste and gender sensitization. Mental health support is non-existent inside the campus and expensive outside. I can survive and get the help I need because I have the privilege to do so. Not everyone in IIT Madras has that privilege.” 

Students, who don’t get the psychological well being help they want, typically flip in the direction of substance abuse, says IIT Guwahati alumnus Logesh. “Students reach out to the counsellors during the initial stage and when they find it to be fruitless, they turn towards substance abuse. There was rampant drug abuse on the Guwahati IIT campus,” he says. 

“Due to the combination of academic pressure and the administration’s indifference towards their issues, students resort to substance abuse. I know friends who have crippling anxiety issues and cannot afford to go outside to get it treated. They aren’t using it recreationally, but to self-medicate. Drug abuse is out of control at IIT Madras,” says Vikram. 

An announcement issued by IIT Madras after the loss of life of Vaipu Pushpak Sree Sai notes, “Post Covid has been a challenging environment and the Institute has been endeavouring to improve and sustain the well-being of the students/scholars, faculty and staff on campus while constantly evaluating the various support systems in place. A standing Institute Internal Inquiry Committee, including elected student representatives, which has been recently constituted will look into such incidents.”

Talking to TNIE about scholar suicides, C Lakshmanan, Associate Professor, MIDS, says, “Post-Covid, suicides are a phenomenon but they are a continuation of pre-Covid structural problems. Indian society has multiple structural problems, which might have been exaggerated by Covid but educational institutions neither in the past nor in the present realise their structural problems.” 

“An IIT campus can isolate you very easily. The culture inside the campus itself is very exclusive. Academia has its own problems and students with a strong social and economic background can cope with them easily, while others can’t. I come from a relatively secure background and I have had difficulties with the curriculum. I can only imagine what my peers from Tamil medium education had to go through,” says Logesh. 

Elaborating on the sociocultural setting on the campus, he says, “The college predominantly has an upper caste culture. The way students dress, the songs they listen to, the places they hang out at, how they greet each other, and what they joke about would be exclusive, making those from lower-middle-class economic backgrounds feel very alienated. Students who feel alienated would go join their linguistic groups. If they are from a Telugu-speaking background, they would find Telugu students. They go join Tamil students if they are Tamil.” 

Regionalism is prevalent amongst IIT college students, particularly once they vote throughout scholar elections, provides Shukla.

“IITs sell merchandise including T-shirts that say ‘born to be an IITian’, which I don’t understand. Doesn’t that imply people born in privileged castes have special rights to join IITs? Shouldn’t it be ‘studied to be an IITian?’ Becoming an IITian must be dependent on one’s education and not birth,” Logesh says.  

Expressing anguish over the isolation and discrimination that prompted Solanki’s loss of life, Ambedkar Periyar Phule Study Circle (APPSC), IIT Bombay, tweeted in February this yr, “How many more Darshans and Anikets need to die? Our statement on the institutional murder of Darshan Solanki. We owe a collective responsibility towards the family of the deceased. As a society, as an institution, what do we celebrate and what do we marginalize?”

According to the information offered by the Education Minister, of the 122 college students who died by suicide from 2014-21, 58% have been from OBC, SC, ST and minority communities. Elaborating on caste discrimination on the IIT Madras campus, Vikram says, “Hypothetically, you have spheres like cultural programmes that are supposed to relieve stress. But, it does not exist in reality. For example, Saarang, our annual cultural fest, has sponsorship and public relations teams. These teams are considered to be very coveted and if you looked at the members of these teams you would see all of them having the same upper-caste, extremely wealthy, tier-one city and urban background.” 

“The interview process to get into these teams is not explicitly casteist, but you have to pass the so-called ‘vibe check’. The vibe check is being able to speak English fluently, rapidly, and idiomatically, fitting in with the tier-1 city expectations. If you don’t pass the vibe check, no matter how good your ideas might be, you will not make it to the team. And there is a specific word that they use –  which is common in IIT Madras – ‘chhatri’. It is supposed to mean ‘very tacky’ and refers to people from tier 2 cities who don’t speak English very well,” he provides. 

Talking to TNIE about casteism in instructional establishments, anti-caste author, scholar and rapper Sumeet Samos says, “One of the major causes for suicides in IITs in India is the numerical majority of upper caste students amidst whom Dalit students feel isolated. This happens mainly because of the lack of sensitisation of upper caste students as well as the lack of support systems for Dalit students. They end up feeling less, inferior, under confident navigating such spaces. To think of a solution would be difficult but a starting point should be introducing mandatory courses on caste sensitisation and providing secure spaces for Dalit students to express themselves to any grievance cells aimed at them.”

Educational establishments ought to replicate floor actuality and since Indian society is heterogeneous, multicultural, multiregional, multilingual and multidimensional, that must be mirrored within the admissions of scholars and appointments of employees and school, says Lakshmanan.
 
“Elite institutions like IITs and IIMs should realise the existing structural inequalities. There are umpteen committees, reports and recommendations that already exist. For example, former University Grants Commission (UGC) Chairman Prof S K Thorat’s committee examined suicides in educational institutions and recommended measures. But, we don’t know if IITs considered these recommendations and made any changes to their existing system,” he says. 

ALSO READ | Scholar dies by suicide; B Tech scholar tries to kill himself in IIT-Madras

Pointing out the administration’s neglect in the direction of scholar deaths, Vikram says, “They send us the same template of emails when they have to inform us of a student’s suicide, which is really dehumanising. Suicides in IITs have become normal. One suicide is one too many. One of our classmates, Fatima Lateef, lost her life by committing suicide. It has been four years and we are still recovering from it.” 

Emphasizing that political events even have a task in bringing a few answer to scholar deaths in instructional establishments, Lakshmanan says, “Political parties are the policymakers in a democracy but I don’t see any party talking about student deaths that are happening all over the country.” 

(*title modified to guard the particular person’s identification)

ALSO READ | Suicide prevention amongst adolescents: Why instructional establishments should take the lead

Discussing suicides may be triggering for some. However, suicides are preventable. In case you’re feeling distressed by the content material or know somebody in misery, name Sneha Foundation – 04424640050 (accessible 24×7) or iCall, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences’ helpline – 02225521111, which is accessible Monday to Saturday from 8 am to 10 pm

V Vaipu Pushpak Sree Sai, 20, a third-year B Tech scholar from IIT Madras, died by suicide on March 14 in his hostel room. This was the second such incident on the campus in a single month. Stephen Sunny, an MS Research Scholar, had died by suicide on February 13. A day earlier, a first-year scholar Darshan Solanki had died by suicide on the IIT Mumbai campus. 

In December 2021, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan had knowledgeable the Lok Sabha that 122 college students of such institutes (together with IITs, IIMs, NITs, NITIEs and Central Universities) had died by suicide throughout 2014-21. Six college students, three every from IITs and the National Institute of Technology, died by suicide in 2023. Eight IIT college students died by suicide in 2022, 4 in 2021 and three in 2020.

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“One of the main reasons students take this extreme decision is academic pressure. Some of it is self-inflicted but a good part of it comes from professors and the administration collectively turning a blind eye to a lot of things,” says Vikram*, a fourth-year scholar of the Integrated MA program in English research at IIT. 

“For example, we have an 85% attendance rule. If you fail to meet this requirement, you have to repeat the course. It is challenging even for people with really good mental health. And professors are arbitrary in applying the rule. Some professors care, some don’t and some calculate it to the decimal level. Some classes have QR codes that you have to scan to get your attendance marked, while in other classes at least you can put in proxy (ask someone to mark it for you),” Vikram tells The New Indian Express.  

Throwing mild on tutorial life at IIT, Mritunjay Shukla, a fourth-year scholar in engineering design and knowledge sciences, tells TNIE, “You come to IIT and after a seven-day orientation, your classes start and you have to get back to quizzes, midterms and exams.”

IIT Madras has an ‘intense, high-pressure setting’ the place college students are unhealthily aggressive, says Vikram, including, “If you take all the over-achievers from various schools and put them in one place, there are bound to be conflicts.” 

“IITs have a relative-grading system. There is no absolute grading, rather the professors decide the students’ ranks based on how the class has performed. One student’s CGPA is dependent on how the rest of the class performs. This leads to students competing with each other in unhealthy ways, like withholding notes. Some of my friends are in the Electrical Engineering (EE) Department and some of them are in Engineering Physics (EP). They had a common subject in EE and the students, collectively, did not tell the EP students where the class was. We don’t have the space to say we don’t care because, at a certain level, we do have to care. I am glad I am not in any of these classes and I am in humanities. It is comparatively better than engineering,” Vikram says. 
 
IIT administrations throughout India have arrange counselling cells to assist college students take care of their psychological well being issues. However, these cells haven’t been performing at their full capability, say totally different sources. 

“The administration sets up counselling centres but it does not become accessible to students. Since there is a stigma about mental health problems among students, they have inhibitions in reaching out for help. Students get mocked by their peers if they talk about being depressed,” Shukla says. 

Criticising the IIT Madras administration’s negligence in the direction of college students’ psychological well being points, Vikram says, “The counselling cell is a joke. We have three full-time counsellors for ten thousand students and people who have gone to them say that they don’t have caste and gender sensitization. Mental health support is non-existent inside the campus and expensive outside. I can survive and get the help I need because I have the privilege to do so. Not everyone in IIT Madras has that privilege.” 

Students, who don’t get the psychological well being help they want, typically flip in the direction of substance abuse, says IIT Guwahati alumnus Logesh. “Students reach out to the counsellors during the initial stage and when they find it to be fruitless, they turn towards substance abuse. There was rampant drug abuse on the Guwahati IIT campus,” he says. 

“Due to the combination of academic pressure and the administration’s indifference towards their issues, students resort to substance abuse. I know friends who have crippling anxiety issues and cannot afford to go outside to get it treated. They aren’t using it recreationally, but to self-medicate. Drug abuse is out of control at IIT Madras,” says Vikram. 

An announcement issued by IIT Madras after the loss of life of Vaipu Pushpak Sree Sai notes, “Post Covid has been a challenging environment and the Institute has been endeavouring to improve and sustain the well-being of the students/scholars, faculty and staff on campus while constantly evaluating the various support systems in place. A standing Institute Internal Inquiry Committee, including elected student representatives, which has been recently constituted will look into such incidents.”

Talking to TNIE about scholar suicides, C Lakshmanan, Associate Professor, MIDS, says, “Post-Covid, suicides are a phenomenon but they are a continuation of pre-Covid structural problems. Indian society has multiple structural problems, which might have been exaggerated by Covid but educational institutions neither in the past nor in the present realise their structural problems.” 

“An IIT campus can isolate you very easily. The culture inside the campus itself is very exclusive. Academia has its own problems and students with a strong social and economic background can cope with them easily, while others can’t. I come from a relatively secure background and I have had difficulties with the curriculum. I can only imagine what my peers from Tamil medium education had to go through,” says Logesh. 

Elaborating on the sociocultural setting on the campus, he says, “The college predominantly has an upper caste culture. The way students dress, the songs they listen to, the places they hang out at, how they greet each other, and what they joke about would be exclusive, making those from lower-middle-class economic backgrounds feel very alienated. Students who feel alienated would go join their linguistic groups. If they are from a Telugu-speaking background, they would find Telugu students. They go join Tamil students if they are Tamil.” 

Regionalism is prevalent amongst IIT college students, particularly once they vote throughout scholar elections, provides Shukla.

“IITs sell merchandise including T-shirts that say ‘born to be an IITian’, which I don’t understand. Doesn’t that imply people born in privileged castes have special rights to join IITs? Shouldn’t it be ‘studied to be an IITian?’ Becoming an IITian must be dependent on one’s education and not birth,” Logesh says.  

Expressing anguish over the isolation and discrimination that prompted Solanki’s loss of life, Ambedkar Periyar Phule Study Circle (APPSC), IIT Bombay, tweeted in February this yr, “How many more Darshans and Anikets need to die? Our statement on the institutional murder of Darshan Solanki. We owe a collective responsibility towards the family of the deceased. As a society, as an institution, what do we celebrate and what do we marginalize?”

According to the information offered by the Education Minister, of the 122 college students who died by suicide from 2014-21, 58% have been from OBC, SC, ST and minority communities. Elaborating on caste discrimination on the IIT Madras campus, Vikram says, “Hypothetically, you have spheres like cultural programmes that are supposed to relieve stress. But, it does not exist in reality. For example, Saarang, our annual cultural fest, has sponsorship and public relations teams. These teams are considered to be very coveted and if you looked at the members of these teams you would see all of them having the same upper-caste, extremely wealthy, tier-one city and urban background.” 

“The interview process to get into these teams is not explicitly casteist, but you have to pass the so-called ‘vibe check’. The vibe check is being able to speak English fluently, rapidly, and idiomatically, fitting in with the tier-1 city expectations. If you don’t pass the vibe check, no matter how good your ideas might be, you will not make it to the team. And there is a specific word that they use –  which is common in IIT Madras – ‘chhatri’. It is supposed to mean ‘very tacky’ and refers to people from tier 2 cities who don’t speak English very well,” he provides. 

Talking to TNIE about casteism in instructional establishments, anti-caste author, scholar and rapper Sumeet Samos says, “One of the major causes for suicides in IITs in India is the numerical majority of upper caste students amidst whom Dalit students feel isolated. This happens mainly because of the lack of sensitisation of upper caste students as well as the lack of support systems for Dalit students. They end up feeling less, inferior, under confident navigating such spaces. To think of a solution would be difficult but a starting point should be introducing mandatory courses on caste sensitisation and providing secure spaces for Dalit students to express themselves to any grievance cells aimed at them.”

Educational establishments ought to replicate floor actuality and since Indian society is heterogeneous, multicultural, multiregional, multilingual and multidimensional, that must be mirrored within the admissions of scholars and appointments of employees and school, says Lakshmanan.
 
“Elite institutions like IITs and IIMs should realise the existing structural inequalities. There are umpteen committees, reports and recommendations that already exist. For example, former University Grants Commission (UGC) Chairman Prof S K Thorat’s committee examined suicides in educational institutions and recommended measures. But, we don’t know if IITs considered these recommendations and made any changes to their existing system,” he says. 

ALSO READ | Scholar dies by suicide; B Tech scholar tries to kill himself in IIT-Madras

Pointing out the administration’s neglect in the direction of scholar deaths, Vikram says, “They send us the same template of emails when they have to inform us of a student’s suicide, which is really dehumanising. Suicides in IITs have become normal. One suicide is one too many. One of our classmates, Fatima Lateef, lost her life by committing suicide. It has been four years and we are still recovering from it.” 

Emphasizing that political events even have a task in bringing a few answer to scholar deaths in instructional establishments, Lakshmanan says, “Political parties are the policymakers in a democracy but I don’t see any party talking about student deaths that are happening all over the country.” 

(*title modified to guard the particular person’s identification)

ALSO READ | Suicide prevention amongst adolescents: Why instructional establishments should take the lead

Discussing suicides may be triggering for some. However, suicides are preventable. In case you’re feeling distressed by the content material or know somebody in misery, name Sneha Foundation – 04424640050 (accessible 24×7) or iCall, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences’ helpline – 02225521111, which is accessible Monday to Saturday from 8 am to 10 pm