The continuing loss of student lives raises a fundamental question: Are these measures reaching students early enough to prevent a crisis, or are they largely reactive? Supporting a student once distress becomes visible is important — but preventing a student from reaching that point requires early detection and proactive intervention.
The four student suicides in barely three weeks — at IIT Bombay, IIT Delhi, IIT Kharagpur, and IIT Guwahati — raise serious questions about whether existing prevention measures are reaching students early enough. The tragedies have also triggered strong student protests, with concerns extending beyond mental health to academic pressure, institutional practices, representation, discrimination, and the campus environment. This suggests broader concerns around frustration, alienation, and trust in the system that counselling and wellness measures alone may not adequately address.
Student distress is likely to reflect multiple interconnected pressures: Intense competition and parental and societal expectations; FOMO and fear of falling behind academically or in placements; rapid technological change and AI; uncertainty about employment; social isolation, loneliness, and perceived discrimination. An institutional culture that disproportionately recognises high performers may further leave struggling students feeling invisible. These pressures can contribute to inadequacy, exclusion, and loss of belonging — signals that a procedural support system may not detect early enough.
IITs have counselling, mentoring, helplines, and wellness programs, but support that becomes visible only after distress is not prevention. A recent student protest against a proposed spiritual-wellness MoU at a premier IIT also underscored the need for more proactive measures. What is needed is an integrated early-warning system involving teachers, mentors, parents, roommates, wing-mates, and close friends to recognise academic decline, behavioural changes, withdrawal, or unusual anxiety. Early identification should lead to confidential assessment, timely intervention and follow-up — not merely referral to a counsellor — and be complemented by flexible academics for students facing academic difficulty.
An often-overlooked dimension is the assessment system itself. Students differ in ability, learning pace, and interests; applying the same assessment scale to everyone can create avoidable academic stress. flexible academics, without lowering standards or compromising fairness, can provide different pathways for students with variable learning abilities.
Over more than three decades of teaching at premier institutions, the author has used small, medium, and large assignments of varying difficulty to accommodate differences in students’ capabilities. He extended the same principle to the format and setting of examinations, with reasonable flexibility where appropriate, while maintaining academic integrity and standards.
Flexible academics does not mean equal outcomes or automatic concessions: Students assessed through different pathways can receive different grades based on their demonstrated performance. The objective is to ensure that students are not pushed beyond their learning abilities merely to reproduce results on a common scale.
This is not about lowering standards; it is about providing different pathways to reach them. A student batch spans a wide spectrum of abilities, learning pace, and circumstances; measuring everyone on the same scale may therefore be neither desirable nor effective.
The IIT Bombay tragedy reminds us that examination processes cannot be viewed in isolation from student well-being. The reported episode involved an examination-related violation; the administration assured the student that the incident would not adversely affect his academic career. Yet in today’s social media environment, an incident can spread far beyond the institution, potentially affecting a student’s image, confidence, and future academic or professional prospects.
There is also a fairness dimension: Several students may engage in similar violations, while only one is detected. Even without discrimination, being singled out — and having the incident widely circulated — can create a strong sense of unfairness.
An examination violation requires due process, but the response should also incorporate sensitivity, early risk assessment, and follow-up. This is where flexible academics becomes relevant: academic integrity and fairness must be preserved, while assessment should recognise differences in students’ capabilities and circumstances and provide appropriate pathways to meet the required standards.
The way forward is a continuous, institution-wide suicide-prevention framework linking early detection, sensitive academic processes, mentoring, counselling, grievance redressal, peer and parental support, and flexible academics. Teachers, mentors, parents, roommates, wing-mates, and close friends can form the first line of early warning and support.
IITs have the academic autonomy, expertise, and resources to build such a model. The need is to shift from responding to distress after it becomes visible to recognising vulnerability early and addressing it before it becomes irreversible.
The writer is a former Professor of Computer Science at IIT Kharagpur, IIT Kanpur, BITS Pilani, and JNU, and a former scientist at DRDO and DST
The circumstances surrounding the incident at the examination hall, originating from the claim that he had used his mobile phone, are now part of the Crime Branch investigation. (Express photo by Sankhadeep Banerjee) 
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