Seven Suicides at IITs in 2011; rising competition and stress can be the cause

Yet another student of IITs, Yalavarthi Sweeya of IIT Patna, commited suicide by jumping from the fifth floor of her hostel building. This year, as many as seven suicides at IITs have already been reported, including:

• 1 in IIT Delhi
• 1 in IIT Kharagpur
• 1 in IIT Kanpur
• 3 in IIT Madras
• 1 in IIT Patna

The situation is grim as academicians, education counselors and parents are worried about how to put an end to such cases. IITs are ranked as premier institutes in the country and it is very easy to blame it on stress caused by rising competition and academic stress. However, the case of Dinesh Ahlawat, the first year student of IIT Delhi who committed suicide on August 4 already puts a question mark to this theory.

According to the sources, Dinesh had scored a zero in the Mathematics exam in his 12th Boards, even though he did very well in the Mathematics section of the IIT Joint Entrance Examination (IIT JEE) and scored 1027 rank in the JEE. He had got provisional admission in IIT Delhi and had given compartment exams for Mathematics in Boards.

The result of compartment exam was declared on August 3. Reportedly, Dinesh surfed net for ten hours on August 3 and for about three hours on August 4 but did not check CBSE results once. Seven minutes after he received an SMS from his sister to ask for his roll number to check his results, he committed suicide. Ironically, he had scored 90% in his compartment exams.

One would think that the biggest issue IITs might be facing at the time is about how to regain its prestige and be ranked among Top 500 list of Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) next year but the situation is much graver as the premier engineering institutes of India and concerned authorities are trying to grapple with suicides at IITs.

Source: Ruchi Shrimali (Shiksha Team)