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Journalism of Courage
Sitting in the ambulance that took her son’s shrouded body back to their home in Banda, Vidya Devi, 45, realised that her days spent sitting under the guava tree in her courtyard, waiting for her “Lalla” to come home, were now over.
On September 1, 21-year-old Anil Kumar, a resident of Uttar Pradesh’s Banda district, was found dead in his hostel room at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi.
Back home, sitting on a plastic chair in the uneven, kuccha courtyard of her two-room house, Devi points to the guava tree to which a few goats are tied. “Anil would pluck guavas from this tree and play cricket by hitting the ball against that wall there… Virat Kohli, he would say, was his favourite… Lalla would pet the goats and feed them too, but could never manage to tie them to the trunk. My son couldn’t even tie a couple of goats and now they say he hung himself? How do I believe this?” she says, tears streaming down her sunken cheeks.
Having failed some classes in his second and third years, Anil, who joined the premier institute in 2019 to pursue a BTech in Mathematics and Computing, did not have enough credits to graduate with his batchmates, IIT officials had said. Anil, who belonged to the SC community, had been given an extension by the college.
The call, journey to Delhi
It was on August 31, two days after the family last had a conversation with Anil, that Amit Kumar, 31, the eldest of Devi’s four children, got the call from IIT-Delhi.
“It was not a conversation I had imagined even in my worst nightmare. I did not know whether to believe the caller or not. I was sure that my brother would not do something like that,” says Amit, an Arts graduate who drives a tempo in Banda and is the family’s sole earning member. Since his father Suresh Kumar, a bus conductor, passed away in September 2020, the family had been struggling financially.
Amit borrowed Rs 20,000 from a relative to hire an ambulance to take them nearly 700 km away to Delhi. “My wife, mother and I left immediately. When we reached the campus, we saw Anil’s room locked from outside. When I peeked through a window, I saw blood on the floor. I think he was murdered,” he says.
A senior Delhi Police officer had earlier said, “Though we have not yet recovered a suicide note, there is no indication of foul play…It has come to light that the student was not performing well, due to which he was suffering from mental trauma…Further probe is on.”
Devi, however, says she did not sense anything amiss during her last conversation with Anil on August 29. “As always, I asked him, ‘Lalla, did you eat on time? And how long before you get your degree?’ He told me that it was his last year in college. I was happy to learn that he would start earning soon. We tried calling him the next day, but he never answered.”
On whether the family was aware that Anil was on extension at IIT-Delhi, Amit says, “He told us that he had to spend an extra year on campus because he was home for a year during the lockdown. Anil had come home for his birthday this July. We couldn’t celebrate it since we have been struggling financially. We didn’t know then that it would be his last birthday with us. He left for Delhi after that and didn’t come home for Rakshabandhan.”
Pulling out a dusty brown trunk, Devi opens it to reveal Anil’s books, drawings, summer projects and some poetry that he had written. “Lalla had beautiful handwriting,” she says, caressing the notebook.
Wedged between equations and sketches, Anil wrote in one of his notebooks before he joined IIT-Delhi: “Since my childhood, my aim was to become a scientist. I didn’t know then that scientists are not made, they are born…”
Anil’s death was reported nearly two months after another IIT-Delhi student, Ayush Ashna, died by suicide in his hostel room. Like Anil, Ayush, who belonged to Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh, was from the SC community.
Maths, cricket and IIT coaching
Shy and lean, dressed usually in tees, and “loved keeping his hair long” — this was how Anil’s family and friends described him as a child.
Anil did his primary schooling in Anousa, his village in Baberu tehsil that’s about 31 km from Banda. “From the time he started writing, we knew he was brilliant… He was always great in Maths… It was his favourite subject,” says Amit, adding that the family moved out of their village to Banda’s Rajeev Nagar about 15 years ago, when his father was posted there.
Anil, by then, would go on to clear the Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya (JNV) selection test, an entrance exam that picks meritorious students from rural areas, and join the JNV at Durendi in his Class 6.
Durendi, about 10 km from Rajeev Nagar and on the banks of the river Ken, and the JNV hostel would be his home for the next five years.
His family says that throughout his stay in the JNV hostel, Anil would visit them regularly.
While in school, it was his passion for cricket that helped him make friends. “Although he was shy and never really played cricket, he would always keep track of the score in his notebook when the school teams played. That scorekeeping made him famous, but it still took him time to open up. And once he did, we realised he was, in fact, quite funny,” says one of Anil’s closest friends from the Durendi JNV, who would later make a similar journey to IIT Delhi.
“While in school, Anil and I were the only two who were selected by the Dakshana Foundation (an NGO that selects Class 10 students from JNVs for a two-year JEE and NEET coaching programme). From Durendi, we went to Rangareddy near Hyderabad (for JEE coaching) and then to Bundi (in Rajasthan),” the friend adds.
K P Agarwal, 56, Anil’s Math teacher in Class 10, says, “He was a very quiet child and very bright in Math. He scored A1 (between 90-100) in Maths in his Class 10 Board exams.”
Agarwal, who was in 2016 posted to the Mahoba JNV, adds, “Although Anil was a very good student, I don’t remember him participating in the extracurricular activities (debates, speeches, quizzes, etc) that we held on the campus on Saturdays. It saddens me to know that such a bright student is no more.”
Anil’s friend at JNV says, “I remember the day we got into IIT. He called me to discuss what branch we should opt for. It was such a proud day for his family.”
The friend and Anil, both from Banda, left for Hyderabad in 2017. Hyderabad was Anil’s first trip outside his home state. “Though Anil remained shy, he opened up somewhat in Hyderabad. None of our childhood friends would believe it, but once both of us bunked classes and scaled the boundary wall of our coaching centre in Gachibowli (near Hyderabad) to eat kathi rolls and chowmein at his favourite cafe,” he says.
The following year, the entire coaching batch was shifted to Bundi, where Anil finished his Class 12. Around the same time, his father broke his spinal cord in an accident on his way to work. One of Anil’s Class 12 batchmates recalls, “We had not gone home for two years by then and were always stressed. In the end, 15 students from Dakshana made it to IIT-Delhi, including Anil and me. While he was excellent in Maths, he was comparatively weaker in Physics and Chemistry.”
Online classes, a lockdown and a death
The first year at IIT, says Govind and Peeyush, Anil’s batchmates from Bundi who made it to IIT Delhi, was “fun” — watching shows, surfing the Internet and attending campus events. Anil was very active on social media then and would routinely post memes on his Instagram account. “He had a good sense of humour,” says Peeyush, adding “He was known at the Bundi centre for his aptitude in Maths. He would score more than the centre’s toppers in the subject.”
Govind adds, “We were together in Bundi and then in the same hostel at IIT-Delhi. So we became quite close.”
Sketching was another of Anil’s passions, they recall, adding that he would sketch characters from anime, TV series and fiction, and share them on social media. Like many others in first year, Anil spent a lot of time on his phone but “he wasn’t one to talk to people much”. “He would talk to you if you spoke to him. He never initiated a conversation on his own,” says Govind.
Peeyush says Anil’s cumulative grade point average (CGPA) at the end of his first year was 6.50, higher than the others in their group.
In 2020, as the country went into the Covid-19 lockdown and his college shifted to online classes, Anil, by then in his third semester, went back to Banda. His father succumbed to a heart attack in September 2020, just months after Anil’s birthday.
Swiping through her phone’s gallery, Anil’s mother stops at photographs taken on Anil’s birthday in July 2020, his last with his father. Anil, his face covered in cake, wears a huge grin as he poses with his parents. “We went big on his birthday that year. Since Anil hated green vegetables, I made poori and paneer,” she recalls.
The pandemic, says Peeyush, first interrupted their channel of communication. “He wouldn’t pick our calls,” he says.
One of Anil’s IIT batchmates says, “He distanced himself from us after his father’s death. I was in Banda during the lockdown. I visited his house a few times and tried to initiate conversations with him on cricket, something he loved, but he hardly spoke. All he said was that he felt low since his father’s demise and that he did not want to talk about his academic performance at all.”
Another of his IIT batchmates says, “In the first year, Anil’s performance was above average. His problems started after the lockdown. After he went back home — he lost his father and his family started suffering financially.”
The batchmate adds, “Students like us, who have studied in government schools all our lives, find it difficult to cope with the demands of IIT’s curriculum. Most of us don’t have the luxury of space or resources like Wi-Fi to study at home. Even if we get a room to study at home, it’s extremely difficult to focus. For an IITian, it is imperative to study for at least 5-6 hours daily after lectures. The pandemic made that almost impossible.”
It’s evident from Anil’s academic records, accessed by The Indian Express, that his performance started dipping in his second year, around the time of the pandemic and his father’s death.
On whether IIT-Delhi had a mechanism to keep track of students’ progress, especially Anil’s, during the lockdown, an official told The Indian Express, “During the pandemic, many relaxations were given to students as a one-time exception. We learnt about his father’s death when he came back after the lockdown. That was when our caretaker spoke to him about his performance. He was given an extension to complete his degree.”
Another batchmate from IIT-Delhi says, “When we came back to college after Covid, we assumed that he would not return because of his backlog.”
But Anil did return to campus in 2021. But by then, he seemed “deflated”. He also arrived much later than his friends, all of whom had no clue about his whereabouts till he called one of them from the railway station in New Delhi.
A friend who was with Anil in both Bundi and IIT-Delhi says the call from the railway station was probably the first sign of distress. “He told me that he had spent the past 2-3 days at the railway station, contemplating whether or not to return. I told him not to worry and asked our friends at Vindhyachal (hostel) to help him settle there. I knew he had failed his classes and that his family wasn’t doing well financially, but he didn’t want to talk about it.”
Having fallen far behind his 2019 batchmates, Anil had to take classes with his juniors and saw fewer and fewer of his batchmates on campus. “He got cut-off from us academically due to his backlog. Our classes ended up being completely different. I don’t know if he ever made friends with his juniors.”
Both Peeyush and Govind say Anil seemed and sounded low since his return. His social media activity too dropped drastically.
Peeyush says, “Anil and I went for a haircut. I tried to broach the subject of his father’s death, but he seemed hesitant to share anything.”
The friend who was with Anil in both Bundi and IIT-Delhi says, “He didn’t reach out to anyone for help. I was myself reeling under academic and financial pressures, so I didn’t think his problems would be any different. I used to give him a pep talk whenever possible.”
But friends and acquaintances say Anil would usually be found seated at the same spot at the dining table in the hostel mess — on the edge and almost always alone. “The conversation with him was almost always one-sided,” says a former hostel resident.
However, several Dakshana students at IIT-Delhi say theirs is a close-knit community and it is unusual for them to feel lonely on campus. “Most people in IIT feel lonely because they don’t have a support group in place, but a student from JNV and Dakshana is always surrounded by known faces after the years spent together coaching for JEE. Even if one is not confident in the first year, we develop confidence by the fourth year. That’s why Anil’s suicide was unexpected. We would’ve helped him out but he never gave the slightest hint of his troubles,” says one of his friends from IIT-Delhi.
His friends said Anil seemed “absolutely fine” during the convocation ceremony for the 2019 batch last month. In fact, Anil had contacted a childhood friend a few days before his demise for recommendations on a new phone.
Stating that Anil’s “disinterest” in his classes was apparent, the MP friend says, “How and why did no one notice that Anil had not come to the mess for two whole days? Someone should have noticed.”
