Opinion Express View on IIT Delhi’s Academic Progress Group: Reaching out
Initiative to help students who are struggling academically is much-needed and heartening
Already in 2024, five student suicides have been reported at various IITs — two in the Kanpur campus and one each in Delhi, BHU and Roorkee 
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If 21-year-old Anil Kumar’s long journey from Banda district in Uttar Pradesh to the hallowed halls of IIT-Delhi embodied the hope that animates the arcs of lakhs of young Indians, as they follow the path of higher education, his death by suicide in September last year echoed an all-too-familiar despair. Following Kumar’s death and in response to the alarming trend of suicide by students who find themselves crumbling under academic pressure, IIT-Delhi set up an Academic Progress Group (APG), also in September, to help out those struggling to keep up with their studies.
This was an encouraging sign of an institute responding to the needs of its students and stepping up to the need to create a supportive and enabling environment. According to documents accessed by the Indian Express through the Right to Information Act, the APG has so far identified 192 undergraduate students as “academically adrift” and has permitted “exceptional cases” to stay with a family member on campus.
Already in 2024, five student suicides have been reported at various IITs — two in the Kanpur campus and one each in Delhi, BHU and Roorkee. In July last year, the Union Minister of State for Education, Subhas Sarkar, told Parliament that in the previous five years, there had been 98 student suicides in central educational institutes (central universities, IITs, NITs, IIITs, IIMs and IISERs).
The numbers speak of a sobering reality, and of a pressure that, in most cases, begins at home and continues in the highly competitive environment of institutes like the IITs. For many students with several years of hard work behind them and the promise of a better future for themselves and their families before them, failure is unendurable. The problem becomes far more acute in the case of students from marginalised groups and regions, for whom success at an IIT may seem like the only way out of generations of poverty.
According to data presented by the Ministry of Education in Lok Sabha in March last year, nearly half of those who died by suicide in IITs since 2018 were from SC, ST and OBC communities. Clearly, it is not enough that students from deprived backgrounds, like Kumar, make it to prestigious institutes; they must be enabled to avail themselves of the opportunities. This can only happen when the institutes themselves become sensitive to their needs.
Before he joined IIT-Delhi, Kumar had written in one of his notebooks, “Since my childhood, my aim was to become a scientist. I didn’t know then that scientists are not made, they are born…” For institutes tasked with helping young people shape their own futures, listening to them is the first step towards addressing their anxieties.
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