Campus suicides: IIT-D panel flags toxic competition, caste bias, burnout

The committee, led by Santosh Kumar Chaturvedi, former Dean of Behavioural Sciences and senior professor of psychiatry at NIMHANS, was set up in March last year following demands by students of the institute.

There were five student suicides in IIT Delhi in 2023 and 2024, with the most recent in October 2024 — a month after the Chaturvedi panel is learnt to have submitted its recommendations.

“Our report was submitted in August last year. We haven’t heard anything from the administration (on the follow-up),” said a member of the committee on the condition of anonymity.

When contacted, IIT Delhi Director Professor Rangan Banerjee referred the reporter to the institute’s Public Relations Officer, Shiv Yadav. Yadav said the institute did not wish to say anything on the committee’s report.

The committee, comprising IIT Delhi teachers and former faculty members, student representatives, and psychologists and psychiatrists from external institutes, met 13 times between April and August 2024. It examined records of previous reports on student welfare, student demands in open house discussions and conducted interviews with campus stakeholders.

It is learnt that the committee’s report flags seven categories for scrutiny: academic environment; discrimination and exclusion; relational climate; mental health issues; counselling and support services; faculty support; infrastructure and administrative challenges.

Its key observations are said to include:

• Toxic competitiveness, rooted in the entrance exam system and intensified by coaching culture, erodes joy of learning and distorts peer relationships. Students arrive valuing scores over human qualities, fostering social isolation and mental health issues. Academic stress is worsened by relentless demands, unrealistic deadlines, and weekend exams and lectures. The grading system reinforces this pressure, promoting competition over collaboration.
• Eligibility for leadership positions and placements is dependent on CGPA; high CGPA is linked directly to career success, promoting anxiety.
• SC/ST students reported feeling stereotyped as undeserving and deficient, leading to anxiety. The committee also observed “microaggressions” — such as asking about JEE ranks, often a veiled attempt to infer caste — as adding to the burden these students face.
• The “relational climate” — quality of teacher-student relationship and student-student relationship and relationship of both with the administration – is marked by mutual distrust.
• Students struggle with post-coaching burnout and adaptation challenges upon entering IIT.
• Despite evidence of high use of counselling service on campus, students said they were distrustful due to confidentiality concerns, perceived stigma, and inadequate sensitivity to social discrimination issues.
• The institute regularly forms committees to investigate problems, but many reports gather dust with little action taken.

To address these challenges, the committee reportedly calls for urgent institutional reforms. These include:

• Publishing a “non-discrimination policy” on IIT website that clearly defines unacceptable behaviour and outlines available remedial measures.
• Compulsory training for all students, faculty, and staff on inclusivity, equality and respectful behaviour.
• Significant reduction in first-semester academic load for UG and M.Tech students and replacing it with life and language skills courses and co-curricular activities
• All first-semester students should visit counseling centres to reduce stigma; counsellors should get specialised training to better support students from marginalised backgrounds.
• Revise aspects such as relative grading, and academic criteria for eligibility to run for leadership positions; facilitate teamwork and collaboration.

The IIT Delhi committee report gains significance in light of the Supreme Court’s directive on March 24 to set up a National Task Force to examine the rising number of student suicides in higher education.

That order came in response to an appeal by parents of two deceased IIT Delhi students against a January 2024 Delhi High Court ruling that declined to direct the police to register an FIR.

The parents alleged that the students —Ayush Ashna and Anil Kumar—“were murdered with the conspiracy of IIT faculty members to hide the real facts, and both students have been falsely shown to have committed suicide”.

The complaint claimed that the students, who belonged to Scheduled Caste, had informed their parents about caste discrimination by the faculty or staff of IIT Delhi and accused the faculty of trying to protect the real culprits.

Data provided by the Minister of State for Education to the Rajya Sabha in 2023 showed that  98 students died by suicide in higher educational institutes since 2018. 21 students died by suicide in 2018 (who were enrolled in Central universities, IITs, NITs, IIITs, IIMs and IISERs), which decreased to 19 in 2019, 7 in 2020 and 7 in 2021. However, the number increased to 24 in 2022 and 20 students have died by suicide in the first seven months of 2023.