New Delhi: The death of an IIT Bombay student on September 18, who was found hanging from the ceiling fan in his hostel room on campus, has triggered protests, bringing back the spotlight on student suicides.
The student allegedly took the extreme step hours after he was caught using a mobile phone during a mid-semester examination, the institute has said.
The incident comes after an IIT Delhi student died by suicide last month, leading to outrage on the campus, and is one of the several such deaths that have occurred across the premier technical institutions of the country in recent years.
Here is an account of what the numbers say, how the IITs and the Centre have acted and the status of official inquiries into such cases.
The Ministry of Education in July 2023 informed Parliament that 39 students have died by suicide in the five years between 2018 and 2023 across IITs.
According to the data compiled by the Global IIT Alumni Support Group, 171 unnatural deaths of students have been recorded in the past 20 years, with 82 per cent of these being suicides on campus.
The National Task Force to address mental health concerns of students and prevent suicides in higher education institutions noted in its interim report that the “suicide epidemic” in educational institutions can be attributed to a plethora of factors, including but not limited to academic pressure, caste-based discrimination, financial stress, sexual harassment, exam failure, etc.
The report, made public in June 2026, noted that the faculty members across IITs felt ill-equipped to address mental health issues, and 90 per cent lacked proper training to support students with such sensitive concerns.
According to the panel’s report, responses from 31 centrally funded institutions, including 23 IITs, showed that although 18 institutes had at least one mental health service provider, only four reported formal training for faculty mentorship programmes, and only 10 reported formal training for peer-support initiatives.
The panel noted that the term "counsellor" was used inconsistently across institutes, making it hard to assess how many trained mental-health professionals were actually available.
The Ministry of Education informed Parliament last month that it had drawn up an 'Integrated approach for Promoting Positive Mental Health, Resilience and Wellbeing' under the Malaviya Mission Teacher Training Programme (MMTTP), a national capacity-building scheme for higher education faculty.
"Under this, fortnightly sessions were being held with faculty members to help them identify and address student mental-health concerns at an early stage," Union Minister of State for Education Sukanta Majumdar told Parliament.
IIT Delhi last month constituted a committee headed by retired Delhi High Court judge Justice Mukta Gupta to examine the death by suicide of a 31-year-old MSc student. The committee, set up following student protests, is expected to submit a report by September-end and has been tasked with looking at the circumstances leading to the death and any institutional lapses that may have contributed to it.
After a PhD student died by suicide at IIT Kanpur earlier this year, the Union Education Ministry on January 22 set up a three-member panel to review the implementation of mental-health guidelines, examine the adequacy of counselling and grievance-redressal systems, identify institutional gaps and recommend measures to prevent suicides. The report of this enquiry has not been made public yet.
IIT Kharagpur has implemented an initiative under which power blackouts are enforced in the evenings to encourage students to leave electronic devices and talk to each other, in a bid to prevent isolation. The ‘Know Your Neighbour’ campaign at IIT Guwahati similarly aims to strengthen the bond between peers.
Realigning curriculum, on-campus wellness and counselling hubs, wellness websites and apps, gatekeeper training model and peer support groups are among the other measures taken by various IITs to protect the mental well-being of students and prevent suicides.