The recent death by suicide of Sahil Wakode, a second-year student at IIT Bombay, has raised questions around alleged caste-based discrimination in the elite institution.

The police are investigating the circumstances leading to Sahil’s unfortunate death on 18 September after an exam incident where he was allegedly using unfair means.

While Sahil’s family sees this as caste-based harassment that drove him to suicide, the IIT-B administration says the student never lodged a complaint of caste discrimination. A majority of the institute’s faculty members have sided with the professor in question.

Let’s hope there is a fair inquiry. But Sahil’s tragic suicide also refocuses attention on another depressing reality. Between 2020-21 and 2024-25, there have been 45 student suicides in just the IITs (there are now 23) — six in 2022-23, 16 in 2023-24, 13 in 2024-25. Twenty-eight of these 45 students came from SC/ST/OBC communities.

Across India, suicides are disproportionately concentrated among the young. A ‘Global Burden of Disease’ study published in The Lancet in 2016 found that suicide was the leading cause of death among people aged 15 to 39. Eight years later, things were much worse.

The latest National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data provides another measure of the problem. India recorded 14,488 student suicides in 2024, compared with 8,068 in 2014 — an increase of nearly 80 per cent over a decade. Student suicides constituted 8.5 per cent of all suicides in 2024 (India recorded 1,70,746 suicides that year) compared with 6.1 per cent in 2014.

It was an uptrend through the decade 2014-24, except 2022,........

© National Herald