Tarushi Aswani 
New Delhi: “I can’t speak to you, I am under radar of the faculty after the recent suicide,” said a BTech student from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi when asked about the suicide of the 21-year-old BTech final year student, Anil Kumar, on September 1. The student who refused to speak to The Wire and the student who died by suicide both come from Schedule Caste communities.
Following the suicide, the IIT Delhi administration called an open house meeting on September 3, to address the suicide, and to understand what led to it and see whether the students wanted to flag issues they were facing on campus.
Students have raised a number of issues pertaining to life on campus – and said institutional harassment and discrimination based on caste is a daily phenomenon.
Questions around this are only likely to get worse with another recent development: the Board of Student Publications circulated a campus-wide survey on caste discrimination, but this survey had to be withdrawn just hours later after students alleged that it “biased, insensitive, and problematic”, The Hindu reported. The institute’s SC/ST Cell said it had not been consulted during the drafting.
The 21-year-old student BTech final year student who died by suicide at IIT Delhi on September 1 was not the only Dalit student to have ended their lives.
In the recent case, the Delhi Police have stated that the student was on degree extension as he failed to clear some exams. DCP (Southwest) Manoj C. had said that around 6 pm, they received a PCR call regarding a suicide by a student at Vidyanchal Hostel. “On verification of facts, it was revealed that a boy, Anil Kumar, enrolled in BTech in Mathematics and Computing (session 2019-2023) committed suicide by hanging,” said the DCP. Police added that as he had not cleared a few subjects, he was residing in the hostel on a six-month extension.
Before Kumar, Ayush Ashna who was also from the mathematics department, had died by suicide on July 10. Both students belonged to Scheduled Caste communities, and their treatment at the institution, many students said, may have pushed them over the edge.
A PhD student from IIT Bombay – a campus which also witnessed Dalit students’ suicides – wishing anonymity, explained to The Wire that SC/ST students have faced harassment on these campuses where mostly faculty belong to the upper castes. The PhD student, who is a part of the Ambedkar Phule Periyar Student Circle (APPSC), said that reservation policies were not being followed during recruitment at IIT Bombay. APPSC students have filed RTIs from which it can be gleaned that around 90% faculty are upper castes.
“This affects the overall atmosphere on campus and in classrooms. There is deep anti-reservation thought on campus. Teachers and students label reservations as anti-merit. Such an atmosphere and mindset on campus makes life difficult for SC/ST communities,” the OBC student said. The student also said that casteism was manifesting itself on campus not just via professors, but several students also indulged in the same. “One upper caste student had an SC roommate; they strictly asked the SC roommate to not touch and ‘pollute’ their belongings. The SC roommate had to take a semester off to deal with this kind of casteist bullying,” they said.
In the response to an RTI application filed by the APPSC of IIT Bombay on July 29, it was revealed that in IIT Delhi, 14 departments had no faculty members belonging SC or ST communities, 24 departments lacked SC faculty, 15 departments lacked ST faculty and nine departments had no faculty from OBC groups. IIT Delhi has a total of 27 departments.
IITs are central universities and receive 100% funding from the Union government and University Grants Commission, and are required to implement the reservation policy that apportions 15% seats to SCs, 7.5% to STs and 27% to OBCs in faculty appointments and course admissions.
Since January 2023, at least seven students from IITs across India have died by suicide. IIT Madras witnessed four deaths, while IIT Delhi saw two suicides and IIT Hyderabad one.
Institutionalised pressure
In view of the incident, IIT Delhi students had released a statement which read, “We, the students of IIT Delhi, condemn the institutionally engineered exclusion, apathy, and indifference that have claimed the lives of two Dalit students, Ayush Ashna and Anil Kumar, in less than two months. This is a moment of crisis, and normal functioning must be temporarily suspended with immediate effect.”
Dheeraj Singh, an alumnus of IIT and IIM who works on diversity in higher education, is deeply concerned about the situation at the IITs. To look deeper into the matter and speak for the students, Singh wrote to IIT Delhi director Professor Rangan Banerjee. “I have sought an appointment with Director Prof Banerjee to speak about the matter of suicides on IIT Delhi campus. But we have to stop looking at this like an IIT problem. It’s a systemic problem of higher educational institutions which are in crying need for major reforms to make them safe and healthy spaces for weaker sections of society. Ministry of Education must look into how they can help such students thrive and implement laws for the same,” Singh said.
He also said that eight suicides in eight months pointed to a systemic issue across IITs. “I spoke to students from the same batch as Ayush and Anil. They have specifically told me that rank is an indirect caste marker to identify SC/ST students, professors use casteist slurs privately, derive sadistic pleasure by failing students, professors refuse to give projects and recommendations, and placement companies use rank and CGPA as filters to weed out SC/ST students. Around 25% of the Maths and Computing department, to which Ayush and Anil belonged, have their degrees on extension due to pride in failing students. These unhealthy practises need to stop,” he said.
Swapnil Prasad, a PhD student from IIT Delhi, attended the open house session called by the IIT administration with the students on Kumar’s suicide. Prasad said that students shared the issues they face with the faculty during the session.
“Comments normalising cutthroat competitiveness are passed by professors. Academic rigour is expected out of us. Even very recently, a female student from BTech tried committing suicide, she was saved in time. We are also told that we must excel beyond expectation since we are at IITs,” said Prasad.
Prasad also shared the pressure and the whole atmosphere to being prepared to exhaust oneself at the institution has left many students with poor mental health. “Certain professors are unnecessarily failing students, they take pride in failing their students. How would this kind of intentional failing sit with students who reach IITs after years of hard work?” asked Prasad.
Addressing the issue, Itisha Nagar, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Delhi University, told The Wire that student suicides cannot be seen from an individualistic lens, it needed to be seen from a systemic lens. For certain economically weaker and marginalised families, Nagar explained that clearing exams at these institutions meant class mobility and having a better future. “There is such pressure and anxiety associated with these institutions as students know that lakhs of students are appearing for few seats. In this atmosphere, with no mental health support and a reduced binary of self-evaluation, which is success and failure – then at that stage any kind of failure or even perceived failure can trigger students into taking their own lives,” she said.
Nagar views these suicides as systemic, pointing towards pressure from parents, unemployment, number of quality institutions and fewer seats in colleges as factors that increase anxiety among students. “Just giving counselling to a student will not matter much, because society defines a ‘successful’ student as someone who clears IITs or such competitive exams by defeating lakhs of other students. We need a society where a kid’s worth is tied to talent or extra-curricular activities or hobbies they enjoy, not marks,” she explained.