Every year more students in India die by suicide, and each loss is put down to pressure. Yet students who clear the hardest exams are used to pressure. The danger lies where heavy outside pressure meets an inner emptiness: goals handed down by parents, schools and society, chased by young people who were never asked what they want to live for. Helplines and counsellors are welcome, but they cannot carry this alone. Can we begin by asking why we are running at all?
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Originally published in The Pioneer on 26 September '26
IIT Bombay has lost its third student to suicide this year; there are allegations of caste-based discrimination, and the matter is under investigation. I will not pre-empt what the investigation finds. But I have had a long-standing relationship with the campuses of the various IITs, and during my visits to over a dozen IIT campuses in the last year, students have recurrently spoken of a vicious pattern. Between 2014 and 2021, 34 IIT students died by suicide, roughly four a year. By the beginning of August 2025, ten IIT students had died by suicide, four of them at IIT Kharagpur alone. This year, at least eight IIT student suicides have been reported so far, with two more deaths being investigated as possible suicides.
Data compiled by an IIT alumnus from RTI replies and media reports counts at least 171 IIT student deaths by suicide or other unnatural causes between 2006 and September 2026, 120 of them since 2016. Between December 2024 and May 2026, seven suicides were reported in connection with BITS Pilani’s Goa campus.
