TNN | Sep 23, 2015, 03.51 AM IST
CHENNAI: A 23-year-old postgraduate student at Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M), hanged himself in his hostel room on the campus on Monday night.
Police said N Nagendra Kumar Reddy was the son of agricultural workers Kanthammal and Narayana Reddy from Kesavapuram village in Cudappah district of Andhra Pradesh.
The second-year MTech student (construction technology and management), his professors and classmates told police, was a bright student.
Reddy did not leave a suicide note and investigators have yet to determine why he committed suicide. His friends, however, told police that he had been dejected about failing to make the cut by one mark in the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE), which he also failed to clear on a previous attempt.
Reddy's friends said he hoped to land a government job despite being an L&T Build India scholar who the technology and construction major had assured of a job. In his first attempt at GATE his rank was past 2,000 and in his most recent attempt it was just past 700.
One of Reddy's friends went looking for him at 9pm after he failed to show up for dinner and found him hanging from the ceiling fan in his room on the fifth floor in Tamraparani Hostel.
"Reddy spent the weekend in at home and returned to the institute on Monday morning," an investigating officer said. "He did attend classes on Monday and remained locked up in his room through the day."
Police sent the body to Government Royapettah Hospital for postmortem.
"He came home on Friday and spent the weekend with us," his father Narayana Reddy said while waiting to receive his son's body at the hospital morgue. "On Sunday night, I saw him off at the bus stop. He appeared disturbed but he told me he would be all right. We had high hopes for him because he was the only IIT-ian in the taluk."
Classmates and teachers said Reddy was a reserved person and did not like to socialize much.
IIT-M civil engineering department head Prof A Meher Prasad said he and other teachers were aghast when they learned of the suicide. "Nagendra had no academic problems," he said. "Our antennas go up if a student's academic performance dips noticeably but that was not the case with him."
Prasad said there were no exams underway and the third semester was relatively easy for MTech students because they had only two courses with an additional project as compared to five courses in each of the first two semesters.
