RTI Series | 20 Deaths Over Past 5 Years, Older IITs Hit Hard By Spike In Student Suicides After Covid-19 – News18

Last Updated:March 29, 2025, 13:08 IST

According to the RTI response, five IITs — IIT-Madras, IIT-Delhi, IIT-Kanpur, IIT-Kharagpur and IIT-Guwahati —- have been the most affected

As many as 20 students allegedly died by suicide across five top-ranking Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) over the past five years, with a rise in such incidents post-pandemic when students returned to regular life on campuses after a long haul, as per data provided by the institutes in response to an RTI query filed by News18. The number of alleged suicides on these campuses, however, is higher, given the fact that some of the institutes did not share the figures as well as when looked at the cases reported nationally.

According to the RTI response, five IITs — IIT-Madras, IIT-Delhi, IIT-Kanpur, IIT-Kharagpur and IIT-Guwahati —- have been the most affected.

Between 2019 (from January 1) and 2024 (till December 31), IIT-Madras and IIT-Delhi saw seven alleged student suicides each, IIT-Kharagpur had four such incidents on campus, and two took place at IIT-Guwahati, as per the data shared by these institutes in response to the RTI query.

Data shows that at IIT-Madras, while no such incident took place last year, three students allegedly died by suicide in 2023. One such incident took place in 2022 while three were reported in 2019. There were no such incidents recorded in 2020 and 2021, which was the time of the pandemic when most educational institutions were shut and classes were held online or in hybrid mode. Only two of these students were females while all the rest were males.

Of the seven incidents reported from IIT-Delhi, two each were in 2024, 2023 and 2021 while one such incident took place in 2019, respectively. No such incident was reported from the campus in 2022. While six of these students were males, only one was a female, as per the the RTI response.

At IIT-Kharagpur, one student died by suicide each in 2020, 2022, 2023 and 2024. Three of these were males while one was female, shows RTI data.

IIT-Guwahati data shows that two students died by suicide on campus — one each in 2022 and 2024, respectively. While the former was an undergraduate (UG) student in department of design, the latter was an MTech student. However, News 18 had last September reported that IIT-Guwahati saw three suicides on campus.

Deaths Reported

At the same time, IIT-Kanpur has not provided the data for the alleged student suicides even as two such incidents were reported from its campus in January 2024 and one in December 2023 while reportedly a PhD student allegedly died by suicide on January 10 this year.

In January 2024, News18 had reported that between December 19, 2023, and January 18, 2024, the institute saw three of its students allegedly dying by suicide. On January 18, a 29-year-old PhD student was found dead in her hostel room. On January 10, an MTech student from the Department of Aerospace Engineering was found dead in his hostel room. On December 19, 2023, a student pursuing post-doctoral research from the Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering was found dead in her hostel room. After the third suicide, students had demanded changes in how their research work was reviewed.

An internal survey conducted in July 2023 by the students’ body of IIT-Kanpur on challenges faced by research scholars showed that 80 per cent of those pursuing PhD faced mental health issues, while 60 per cent had at least once thought of dropping out of the research programme and several recorded being discriminated against by guides in the face of “favouritism”, “elitism” and “casteism”.

Similarly, IIT-BHU too did not share the data and has only shared information about its student counselling services instead.

News18 had on September 19, 2024, reported that the year until then had already seen eight students allegedly dying by suicide across five IITs, including three in Guwahati, two in Kanpur and one each in Delhi, BHU and Roorkee.

After a spate of suicides at these IITs, protests broke out on campuses with students demanding ‘systemic’ and ‘structural’ reforms in the functioning of the institutes, ultimately forcing the former to take note and introduce policy changes. Several of these institutes have since introduced a slew of academic reforms.

None of these institutes, except for IIT-Delhi and IIT-Kharagpur, shared the social category-wise and economic category-wise break-ups of the deceased students. In case of IIT-Delhi, four of the seven students were from reserved categories (SC, OBC), while three belonged to the general category. At IIT-Kharagpur, while two of the four students belonged to the general category, the other two belonged to EWS and ST categories, respectively.

In addition, none of the institutes shared reasons that may have come up in their internal investigations into the alleged suicides, with several citing that “they have no such information”. Some institutes cited confidentiality as the reason for not sharing the requested information.

Only IIT-Delhi and IIT-Madras shared the data of the number of students receiving counselling at their respective campuses. As many as 12,289 students sought mental health counselling between January 2020 and January 2025 at IIT-Delhi. For IIT-Madras, this figure stood at 6,402 students between 2019 and 2024.

“IIT-Madras has three teams providing counselling services for students and staff – 11 team members are available at the counselling facility at the wellness centre, four team members are available at the institute hospital,” the response stated.

While IIT-Kharagpur and IIT-Delhi stated that they have 10 full-time counsellors each, IIT-Guwahati said that it has four full-time counsellors and IIT-BHU has two.

Academic Reforms

The spate of student suicides forced the institutes to introduce academic and policy reforms. Some of the major reforms taken up over the past two years include relaxing attendance norms and exam schedules; lowering average marks to pass; rationalising the number of credits to complete a course; introducing a ‘no-termination’ policy; sports excellence-based admissions and; extending vacations to allow students to unwind.

IIT-Madras was the first to introduce sports excellence-based admissions in 2024 to allow national and international-level champions qualifying the JEE-Advanced exam to get admission to BTech programmes. Following this, it has also announced extending this to those excelling in fine arts and culture, admissions to which will begin from the 2025-26 academic session.

Beginning last year, IIT-Delhi relaxed the overall CGPA (Cumulative Grade Point Average) criteria — an index of a student’s academic performance. This means that students can now get a graduation degree by just passing all the required courses — a significant policy change that has been brought about to address mental health issues. The institute has also made changes in the re-start and termination policies, allowing students to progress academically putting them on probation period.

IIT-Guwahati had last year ensured students that it will look into relaxing the 75 per cent mandatory attendance rule and bringing in more ‘flexibility’ in the existing academic policies.

IIT-Kanpur has worked out a ‘no-termination policy’ for postgraduate (PG) students in the first semester. Both IIT-Kanpur and IIT-Kharagpur stated that they have implemented ‘gatekeeper’ programme for preventing suicides.

“We have established a mechanism to closely monitor mental-health related cases of serious nature. Each such student is regularly monitored by a team, which includes faculty advisor, hall warden, counsellor, and a faculty member of the Dean, Student Affairs Council, to lend support and prevent them from taking any extreme step,” IIT-Kharagpur stated in its RTI response.