IIT and Suicide

Every year at least half a dozen students in the IITs ended their lives. IIT Council has decided to constitute a Task Force to study the issue of increasing suicides and recommend appropriate measures to prevent such cases. The Task Force shall be headed by an eminent person and include representatives of parents, teachers, alumni, professional counselors and will submit its report in four months. The panel may be headed by the Director of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Science, Bangalore and comprise five or six mental health experts.

This hangama over the death of half a dozen students every year is in a land where two million U-5 kids perish annually due to malnutrition. TB swallows each year half a million. A few may chide me for comparing suicides with natural deaths. These are not natural deaths but state assisted killings. Let us consider another suicide issue. Since 1995, a quarter million farmers ended their lives due to rural economic stress. Every hour two food providers terminate their lives. That is nearly three thousand times the suicide deaths in IITs. Recent 11 deaths in Delhi shook the entire creamy layer. None cared to look at this farm suicide for one decade. Only after the 'India Shining' brigade was stopped from 'Feeling Good', the UPA appointed a commission to study the issue and suggest remedial measures. Six years passed after this committee gave its recommendations. But the suicides continue unabated. No question of any task force. Why this monumental apathy from the 'informed' society?

IIT Kanpur and Rajasthan Chairman Anandakrishnan gives the answer: “IIT students are valuable assets to the nation. Only the cream of the society joins the IITs and they have a very good opportunity of becoming leaders in the society”. Poor farmers don’t have the ghost of a chance to enter any IIT to get salvation.