Campus suicides: IIT Delhi panel highlights stress, caste prejudice, and toxic competitiveness

Committee demands broad reforms, including reducing first-year stress and providing “life lessons” to more compassionate leaders.

A committee established by IIT Delhi last year to study the institutional processes and environment in the context of student suicides identified a number of important triggers, including post-coaching burnout, a grading system that perpetuates toxic competitiveness, unrelenting academic demands, and a culture characterized by caste and gender-based discrimination. 

A clear anti-discrimination policy, a reconsideration of CGPA (or Cumulative Grade Point Average) as the only success metric, the selection of more compassionate campus leaders, the strengthening of faculty-student relationships, mandatory civic education to lessen bias, and increased administrative responsiveness to student concerns are just a few of the extensive structural campus reforms that the 12-member committee has suggested to ease student distress.

In 2023 and 2024, IIT Delhi had five student suicides, the most recent of which occurred in October 2024, one month after the Chaturvedi panel is said to have made its recommendations.

“Last August, we sent in our report. On condition of anonymity, a committee member stated, “We have not received any communication from the administration (about the follow-up).” Professor Rangan Banerjee, the director of IIT Delhi, sent the reporter to Shiv Yadav, the public relations officer for the institute. According to Yadav, the institute had nothing to say about the committee’s findings.

Between April and August of 2024, the committee—which included instructors and previous faculty members from IIT Delhi, student representatives, and psychologists and psychiatrists from other institutions—met thirteen times. It conducted interviews with campus stakeholders and reviewed records of earlier reports on student welfare and student demands in open house debates.

According to what has been learned, the committee’s report highlights seven areas for examination: the academic environment; exclusion and discrimination; the relationship atmosphere; mental health concerns; counseling and support services; faculty support; and administrative and infrastructure difficulties.

Its main findings are reportedly as follows:

• Peer connections are distorted and the joy of learning is undermined by toxic competitiveness, which has its roots in the admission exam system and is exacerbated by coaching culture. 
• Students prioritize test results over personal traits, which leads to social isolation and mental health problems. 
• Unrealistic deadlines, unrelenting demands, and lectures and examinations on the weekends all contribute to academic stress. This pressure is increased by the grading system, which favors competitiveness over teamwork.
• CGPA determines eligibility for leadership roles and postings; a high CGPA is closely associated with career success, which increases anxiety.
• SC/ST students reported experiencing anxiety as a result of being perceived as inferior and undeserving. The committee also noted that “microaggressions”—such as inquiring about JEE ranks, which is frequently a covert attempt to deduce caste—add to the difficulties these students encounter.
• Mutual mistrust characterizes the “relational climate,” which includes the quality of the relationships between students and teachers as well as between students and the administration.
• When they first arrive at IIT, students face difficulties adjusting and post-coaching fatigue.
• Students expressed mistrust because of perceived stigma, worries about confidentiality, and a lack of awareness of social discrimination issues, even though there was evidence of a high usage of counseling services on campus.
• The institute frequently establishes committees to look into issues, yet many of the reports go unanswered.