In the middle of an ongoing suicide crisis, I am compelled to put my pain, anger, and reflections into this small reflective piece. From Rohith Vemula to Jason Arday, from Anitha to Delta, the crisis is a product of systemic failure and the failed project of the welfare state, which was expected to safeguard the interests of the more vulnerable and those who have no resources or cultural capital at their disposal to withstand a highly neo-liberalized, Brahminical, racially segregated, and gender-biased world engulfed in the fraught logics of ‘meritocracy’.
It was hardly two weeks since Jason Arday’s ordeal, which resulted in his suicide- I am rather inclined to term it systemic murder of marginalised bodies. When another Google search, returned with the headline, another IIT student allegedly committed suicide, at what is purportedly the country’s most ‘meritocratic shop’, producing efficient docile bodies for the neoliberal industry!
The recurrence of suicides across IITs compels a question: what makes a student at an institute celebrated as a guarantor of upward economic and social mobility take their own life? Possibly, the explanation lies not within the student at all; rather, the institution itself becomes the focal lens of our inquiry.
Why are these campuses becoming deathscapes?
At dawn on a Saturday in August, a second-year M.Sc. student took his life at IIT Delhi. His suicide stirred the same question that each lost life before his has opened- Is it the institutional environment of the IITs that produces this recurrence?
Recurrence of Suicide:
According to the statistics compiled by independent trackers, drawing on partial government data, records a staggering 160 suicides across IITs within the past two decades. The recent ruling by the Central Information Commission (CIC) flagged a persistent crisis of suicides across IIT campuses. At IIT Delhi alone, eight students have died by suicide in the past two and a half years, roughly once every fourth month at this institution. Nationally, IIT Kharagpur and IIT Kanpur, the notorious ones, have been designated “concentration zones” owing to the high intensity of cases, alongside other premier institutes such as IISC Bangalore.
The rate of recurrence sprouts a question about the institutional experience of students who lost their lives. IITs as institutions invested in the fraught ideal of meritocracy, often function as competitive, toxic workplaces obsessed with productivity optimisation. The institutional environment of IIT needs to be viewed through this framework, in which intense academic pressure, coupled with social burden, creates conditions in which a student’s worth is seen as inseparable from their academic performance.
It is worth stressing that this burden isn’t evenly distributed nor does it reflect the collective institutional experience among students. The vulnerability gets compounded for students specifically hailing from marginalised social locations. Besides the relentless scholarly strain, they also carry the burden of representation- the weight of representing their community in a space that was never designed keeping them in mind. Caste, class and institution isolation intersect here, making the burden heavier. Therefore, framing this as a uniform institutional experience would inadvertently obscure those at greater risk. Each of these deaths lays bare the underlying reality of institutional negligence, the absence of robust student support systems, and the conditions students are left alone to endure. This isn’t merely an anomaly, it points to the long trend of “administrative lapses”, a refusal by universities to acknowledge these deaths as a systemic problem, and a corresponding negligence in curbing further deaths.
The Language of Evasion:
Media treatment of these suicides often frames this recurrence as a consequence of a “chain reaction”, the idea that one student’s suicide triggers suicidal ideation in another with pre-existing suicidal ideation. “Unofficially we are not supposed to discuss it amongst ourselves. Officially everyone knows, as if silence doesn’t spread just as fast, and trigger just as much”, Adarsh*, revealed an IIT student, characterising an undercurrent which runs through whisper networks. Beneath this, as an unofficial and incognito practice, students are advised to refrain from discussing suicide on campus, stemming from fear of “suicide contagion”. Though the clinical validity of this practice is questionable, the social effect of this approach does succeed in suppressing the conversation around this phenomenon, thus concomitantly aiding the institution evade confrontation. Even the administrative responses are composed in a deflecting register. Every death follows the same customary email template, under the header, “Sad news”, a performance of concern that changes nothing, while actively obscuring institutional accountability narratives. Further, the pattern of vocabulary across institutions deploying phrases such as “isolated incident”, “mental health” and “committee formed” remains consistent. This language reduces structural issues into a pathological and an individual predisposition.
Suicide cannot be adequately understood as a purely individual or psychological phenomenon. Notwithstanding the solitary nature of the act itself, the degree to which an individual experiences a sense of belonging, connectedness, and social integration constitutes as equally significant determinants. When this integration weakens, or when the society’s moral framework becomes either too rigid or too loose, a state of crisis unfolds within an individual. Institutions do not merely create rules; they actively structure an individual’s perception of the self and of success and failure. These normative rules constitute the very persona of the “successful individual”.
At the IITs, this image resonates with extraordinary intelligence, relentless competitiveness, and interminable productivity optimisation, all without exhibiting any vulnerability. A student’s failure to live up to this created image is not read as failure of the system, but as a matter of personal inadequacy. It’s framing as an individual’s inadequacy makes the pressure so effective, thereby requiring no external enforcement. The internalisation by students towards relentlessly performing and optimizing themselves, becomes both the source of pressure and its target. Academic competition curdles into self-exploitation, where any inadequacy towards meeting these high-academic standards is experienced as a moral and existential failure of the self, never as a flaw in the standard itself. Thus, the individual becomes the site of issue, their personal dejection becomes the victim, while the institution remains unquestioned.
Speaking of the recent death, when a death is coded as mental illness rather than the outcome of institutional negligence, issues such as “denial of hostel facilities”, “denied major academic project” never come close to being registered as evidence of a structural pattern. In the wider frame, explaining such a crisis through individualisation escapes scrutiny of deeper machineries such as the graded caste hierarchy and class inequality. These deaths aren’t mere idiosyncrasies; they’re better understood as failures of a system infused with institutional apathy. With regard to the structural pattern, there’s another dormant failure compounding the individualisation narrative: the absence of a standardised, consistent national database tracking students’ suicide across IITs. The existing data from the Supreme Court, Parliament, or the Ministry of Education are fragmented and mutually inconsistent, with figures either overlapping or spanning different timeframes. The very state apparatus meant to hold these institutions accountable is operating in the absence of a stable object of knowledge. This form of instability isn’t merely a clerical failure; it puts the political class in an uncomfortable position. Taken together, the individualisation narrative and the absence of reliable data reflect the practice of evasion by both the state and its institutions.
Fracturing the culture:
The culture of protest at IIT Delhi isn’t ordinary. It is highly unusual for IIT students to ruffle the administration’s feathers with this kind of agonistic confrontation, since the fear ingrained in the students here is deeply structural, not incidental. Any dissent has historically carried consequences, sometimes strained relationships with supervisors, rigged academic records, or being unofficially marked as an “unserious” student. Oftentimes, the culture of being indifferent to injustices within these institutions also emanates from the fear of getting penalised. This suppression, and the fear of being labelled, has long dissuaded any dissent from emerging at all. The silence over this many deaths can plausibly be attributed to why these suicides became routine, rather than rupture. Yet this protest cannot be read in isolation, it also shares the wider wave of dissent witnessed across the state in recent months. Weeks earlier, the nationwide protest drew the same generation onto the streets, ferreting accountability towards the precarious state of the Indian education system. The scale of mobilisation followed by Hrishikesh’s death is something that none earlier deaths within IIT, in recent memory, has produced.
The sloganeering of “Investigation, Compensation, and Resignation”, by the student collective in the Lecture Hall of IIT Delhi speaks to a demand for redistributive justice, from the administration to recognize these deaths as failure of institutions. In doing so, it has succeeded in rekindling the demand for institutional accountability from the institutions, in which earlier deaths, despite their recurrence, remained absent from public discourse. The protest extends beyond symbolic administrative fixes towards challenging the structural flaws persisting within the system. Beyond individual diagnosis, redistributive justice here would require adequately funded mental health personnel, not the faculty sporting a counsellor label, mandatory compensation for the deceased’s family, and ensuring faculty diversity proportionate to student diversity within committees. Such demands challenge the system to rethink and requisition the existing mechanisms and their speculation in academic spaces, which are deemed sufficient once the pressure becomes overwhelming.
According to Hrishikesh’s mother’s account, shared publicly during the protest, the deceased who lost his father years ago, had been battling mental health issues, previously been hospitalised for the same and later resumed his studies. He had also confided in the counsellor at the institute about his struggles. In the time since, he was denied “a major academic project under his supervisor, “denied hostel facilities”, due to his mental health illness. These facts reflect the administrative indifference shown towards his distress, despite having sought support from what the institute offers. When an institution flags a student as “severely depressive”, or exhibiting “suicidal ideation”, this identification should be followed by institutional duty of care, rather than employing this diagnostic function to depriving the student of essential amenities and pushing them towards further precarity. This scenario, in its most precise sense, is the institutional betrayal the deceased went through.
The larger question is, not merely to counsel students to survive within these institutions, but to confront the relentless culture of self-optimisation, and other structural harms such as caste-based discrimination, class inequality, and cultural alienation. Counselling isn’t the panacea for student’s survival, no specific remedy is, least of all counselling alone. Institutional redressal mechanisms such as counselling and campus wellness centres cannot mitigate the kind of distress manufactured by the institution themselves. Placing such mechanisms equivalent to addressing academic pressure silently shifts the blame onto the student’s incapacity to cope, rather than introspecting into conditions they are expected to cope within. It is worth situating this issue in a wider frame. When in a hyper neoliberal environment, where job markets are contracting, mental health concerns are soaring, even meritocratic showcase institutions such as IITs are no longer reliably delivering the economic security it once seems promising, it is worth laying out briefly here to not read these deaths as outcome of individual inadequacy, but these vulnerabilities as produced by the society itself. These deaths are often accumulated results of adverse conditions infused within the institutions.
*Adarsh (name changed for the reasons of maintaining anonymity of the respondent) is a scholar at IIT Delhi who shared his experience of being in the institute following a student’s suicide.
(The author is a second-year PhD scholar at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her doctoral research examines the student suicide crisis in higher educational institutions in India, with a particular focus on caste-based structural discrimination as a contributing factor)
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