{
  "type": "article",
  "title": "Inside the IIT Crisis: How Relentless Grading, Job Insecurity, and Discrimination Push Premier Campuses to the Edge",
  "summary": "The death of IIT Bombay student Sahil Wakode has intensified the national spotlight on relentless academic strain, caste friction, and the fragile support systems across India's premier engineering institutes.",
  "content": "Securing a coveted seat at an Indian Institute of Technology represents the pinnacle of academic ambition for over a million young aspirants every single year, yet beneath that celebrated triumph lies a grueling environment claiming scores of young lives. The passing of Sahil Wakode, an undergraduate scholar at IIT Bombay on 18 September 2026, has once again exposed the perilous fractures within these prestigious establishments. Data compiled by the Global IIT Alumni Support Group reveals that no fewer than 65 scholars lost their lives to suicide across these campuses between 2021 and 2025, turning public attention toward severe systemic distress that leadership can no longer dismiss as isolated tragedies.\n\nThe Final Hours of Sahil Wakode at Powai\nTwenty-two-year-old Sahil was enrolled in the second year of his B.Tech curriculum under the Department of Energy Science and Engineering at the Powai campus. On the morning of 18 September, between 11 am and 1 pm, he sat for his mid-semester assessment. Around 6 pm that same evening, his unresponsive body was found inside his hostel quarters. The circumstances preceding this outcome reveal sharp disagreements between administrative accounts and student testimonies.\n\nInstitutional representatives stated that Sahil was detected resorting to unfair examination practices during the morning session, having supposedly photographed questions to fetch answers using ChatGPT. According to the faculty forum, invigilator Prof Suryanarayan Dulla lodged an official complaint in compliance with standard operating regulations. However, peers writing the test in the same hall recounted a far more hostile encounter. They stated that upon discovering the phone, Prof Dulla ordered Sahil out of the room, denied him the chance to resume writing, and threatened him with a one-year suspension. The institute contested this characterization, maintaining that no punitive measures had been initiated and asserting that senior departmental staff had reassured the youth that his career prospects remained unharmed.\n\nAllegations of Caste-Based Harassment and Police Action\nRavindra Wakoda, the deceased student's father, leveled direct charges of institutional harassment against both Prof Dulla and institute Director Shirish Kedare. In the official police complaint, Wakoda stated that his son had endured persistent hostility over the preceding three months, alleging that Dulla had insulted the youth regarding his caste background and threatened to implicate him in fabricated infractions under instructions from top administration. Expressing her profound grief, Sahil's mother stated, \"My son was killed. He was harassed a lot.\"\n\nLaw enforcement authorities have filed a First Information Report against Prof Dulla under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act alongside charges concerning abetment of suicide. More than 400 scholars mobilized across the campus demanding thorough structural reforms and accountability. Recognizing the gravity of the public outcry, authorities transferred the entire inquiry to the Crime Branch, while Director Shirish Kedare signed off on an 18-point charter of demands presented by protesting scholars.\n\nOfficial Records and Independent Tallies of Student Deaths\nGovernment disclosures in Parliament over recent years demonstrate an unrelenting pattern of student loss. In December 2021, the administration informed the Lok Sabha that 34 suicides were documented across these institutes during the seven-year stretch from 2014 to 2021. Further legislative submissions in March 2023 recorded 33 suicides over the five-year window spanning 2018 to 2023, while a July 2023 Rajya Sabha submission noted 39 instances since 2018.\n\nIndependent tracking groups present an even starker reality. Global IIT Alumni Support Group figures indicate that at least 65 scholars ended their lives between January 2021 and December 2025. Group founder Dheeraj Singh stated that data gathered through Right to Information queries and public records indicates 74 unnatural deaths and suicides occurred across 15 separate campuses from September 2021 through 18 September 2026.\n\nThe Core Drivers Behind Premier Campus Despair\nAcross India, 23 institutes provide merely 18,951 undergraduate seats. In 2026 alone, over 1.5 million candidates registered for JEE Main, with just roughly 170,000 making the cutoff for JEE Advanced. Statistically, only one in ten Advanced candidates and a single student out of every hundred Main aspirants successfully matriculates. The Supreme Court-monitored National Task Force, parliamentary submissions, and campus surveys identify four underlying structural factors turning these institutions into high-pressure environments.\n\n1. Relative Grading Systems and Shrinking Placement Prospects\nThe National Task Force observed that winning admission merely intensifies an already brutal competitive treadmill. Inside classrooms governed by relative grading, personal accomplishment is decoupled from mastery and tied strictly to peer defeat; an individual scoring 90 percent might still walk away with a mediocre or failing evaluation if the rest of the batch hits 95 percent. This dynamic leads students to measure their self-worth exclusively through numerical metrics.\n\nCompounding this anxiety is an increasingly unpredictable job market. During 2024, approximately 38 percent of graduating scholars failed to secure employment through campus recruitment drives. Analysts note that suicidal crises cluster heavily around mid-term evaluations, finals, and corporate recruitment windows. An internal campus survey carried out following the 2023 passing of student Darshan Solanki discovered that 61 percent of participants blamed academic distress for campus suicides, while 12 percent highlighted anxieties surrounding future livelihoods.\n\n2. Extreme Faculty Homogeneity and Underrepresentation\nA profound social divide between instructors and pupils severely degrades campus dynamics, according to the National Task Force. While reservation policies diversify the student demographic, the teaching corps remains overwhelmingly homogenous, leaving marginalized youth without empathetic mentors. In 2019, then Human Resource Development Minister Prakash Javadekar confirmed to lawmakers that out of 6,043 faculty members across these centers, merely 149 belonged to the SC category and 21 to the ST category, totaling a meager 2.8 percent representation.\n\nA subsequent 2024 RTI disclosure established that upper-caste educators comprised upwards of 80 percent of teaching rosters across eight major campuses, climbing beyond 90 percent at the Bombay and Kharagpur facilities. Students frequently recount facing subtle disparagement regarding entrance ranks, public questioning of their merit, and systematic social ostracism. Conversely, many instructors maintain that caste prejudice does not exist within their walls. Official December 2021 disclosures revealed that of 34 deaths between 2014 and 2021, 13 were OBC candidates and five belonged to the SC bracket, with no ST casualties reported.\n\n3. Untrained Faculty and Barriers to Mental Health Support\nDrawing on reporting by journalist Sneha Belsin, the Task Force emphasized that relentless workload expectations, recruitment stress, and isolation severely undermine psychological well-being. Absent timely intervention, some students resort to substance abuse as a coping mechanism. While administrations routinely classify tragedies as personal mental health struggles, professional counselors highlight that the vast majority of deceased individuals never stepped foot into institutional therapy centers prior to their deaths.\n\nThe institutional deficit was codified in a 2025 Supreme Court verdict, which pointed out that roughly 90 percent of professors across these campuses possess no formal training or competency to identify emotional crises or guide vulnerable youth.\n\n4. Power Asymmetries in Research Supervision\nFor doctoral scholars pursuing research under five-year fellowships, career outcomes depend almost entirely upon their designated thesis supervisor. This extreme imbalance of authority has led to profound friction. In 2023, following the death by suicide of IIT Madras doctoral candidate Sachin Kumar Jain, his guide Prof Ashish Kumar Sen was held accountable and placed under suspension. The Task Force confirmed during campus evaluations that supervisors frequently alternate between prolonged neglect of their candidates and autocratic micro-management, exacerbating psychological distress. As the Union Education Minister acknowledged before Parliament in March 2023, severe academic pressure, personal struggles, and mental health challenges continue to form a combustible mixture inside India's elite academies.\n\nWhat this means for you\nThe escalating distress across premier engineering colleges directly impacts academic planning, student safety, and parental expectations across the country.\n\n• Across India: Millions of engineering aspirants and their families must recognize that entering a premier institute does not eliminate structural pressure or competitive strain. Households need to prioritize mental resilience and seek regular communication rather than focusing solely on grades or placements.\n• In Maharashtra: The Crime Branch investigation at the Powai campus and the signed 18-point charter could force immediate revisions in grievance monitoring and faculty oversight in Mumbai. Students enrolled in technical colleges across the state may see stricter compliance regarding student protection protocols.\n• For students: Scholars navigating rigorous relative grading should proactively utilize independent counseling services and institutional grievance cells rather than suffering in isolation. Understanding legal safeguards against discrimination offers a tangible recourse when confronting hostile campus environments.\n• For parents: Families must actively decouple a student's personal value from academic marks, entrance ranks, or recruitment compensation. Recognizing early warning signs of burnout and offering unconditional emotional backing can prevent severe psychological crises.\n\nWhy this happened\nThe recurring pattern of scholar distress stems from a combination of hyper-competitive academic benchmarks, severe social imbalances, and rigid supervisory structures within technical institutes.\n\n• Immediate trigger: The tragedy followed an examination confrontation where the student was barred from continuing his test and allegedly threatened with a long suspension. Concurrently, the family formally registered charges of sustained caste prejudice and harassment spanning several months.\n• Academic and placement stress: Under relative evaluation models, scholars find themselves pitted against high-achieving peers, where minor point differences can severely downgrade academic standing. This intense strain is further exacerbated by shrinking campus job placements, where nearly 38 percent of graduates in 2024 remained unhired.\n• Severe faculty demographic gap: Over 80 percent of teaching positions across major campuses are held by general category educators, while SC and ST representation stood at merely 2.8 percent in official records. This demographic divide leaves students from marginalized communities without accessible mentors who share their social background.\n• Institutional insensitivity: Judicial observations noted that approximately 90 percent of professors lack professional training to manage students experiencing acute psychological vulnerability. Furthermore, unchecked authority held by thesis supervisors creates severe power imbalances for research scholars.\n\nQuestions & Answers\n\n1. What incident occurred at IIT Bombay on 18 September 2026?\nSahil Wakode, a 22-year-old second-year B.Tech scholar, was found dead in his hostel quarters hours after appearing for a mid-semester examination.\n\n2. What allegations were made by Sahil Wakode's family?\nHis father lodged an FIR charging Prof Suryanarayan Dulla and Director Shirish Kedare with caste-based harassment and intimidation over the past three months.\n\n3. What is the proportion of SC and ST faculty members across IITs?\nGovernment data submitted in 2019 showed that out of 6,043 faculty members, only 149 were from SC and 21 from ST communities, totaling just 2.8 percent.\n\n4. How many student suicides were documented between 2021 and 2025?\nAccording to the Global IIT Alumni Support Group, at least 65 scholars ended their lives across these institutes between January 2021 and December 2025.\n\n5. How difficult is it to gain admission to an IIT?\nIn 2026, over 1.5 million aspirants competed for 18,951 seats through JEE Main, with roughly 170,000 candidates reaching the JEE Advanced stage.\n\n6. How has the administration responded to student protests at IIT Bombay?\nThe case investigation was transferred to the Crime Branch, and the institute director signed off on an 18-point charter of demands presented by students.",
  "url": "https://trendkia.com/en/investigations/iit-bombay-ke-chhatra-sahil-wakode-ki-mauta-se-gaharaya-snkata-kainpasa-men-tanava-aura-bhedabhava-para-uthe-gnbhira-savala-35862",
  "category": "Investigations",
  "publishedAt": "2026-09-21",
  "tags": [
    "IIT Bombay",
    "Sahil Wakode",
    "student suicide",
    "higher education",
    "caste discrimination",
    "mental health",
    "JEE Main",
    "Crime Branch probe"
  ],
  "language": "en",
  "site": "TrendKia"
}