January 19, 2016
Students ending their lives, unable to cope up with pressure of competitive exams and expectations from families is an increasingly disturbing phenomenon. It is more saddening that for every high profile death, there's countless other students-turned statistics out there, buried inside your newspaper in tiny columns.
1. January 2016, Hyderabad
The Hindu
Rohith Vemula, one of the five dalit scholars expelled by the University of Hyderabad last year, committed suicide by hanging himself at a hostel.
"The value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility. To a vote. To a number. To a thing. Never was a man treated as a mind," Vemula wrote in his note before killing himself, taking no names.
The 25-year-old, a resident of Guntur, was doing his PhD in science technology and society studies for the past two years, before the scholar allegedly got involved in a tiff with the BJP-backed Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) in August last year.
2. December 2015, Kota
bccl
14-year-old Bhanu Kumar, found hanging from a fan in his hostel room was the 30th suicide in IIT coaching hub Kota, and also the third suicide in that very week.
Kumar, a resident of Saharsa district in Bihar, came to Kota when he was just 13 to improve his performance in physics and mathematics. He was enrolled in class IX at a city school and at a coaching centre for an edge course in science subjects. However records from his institute showed that he was a regular absentee and the centre had informed his parents about their son's behaviour.
Incidentally, the death happened a day after the district administration undertook a major exercise to de-stress coaching students to curb the spate of suicides.
3. October 2015, IIT Madras
An Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M) student was found hanging from the ceiling fan of his hostel room in October. The pre-final-year student dual-degree Electrical Engineering student's on-campus suicide was the second one in the preceding 30 days.
If you've read our story on IIT Madras's Suicide Problem, you'd not be surprised
4. November 13, 2015, J&K
iamin
Broken after learning that he had failed in his favourite subject, Mohammad Adnan Hilal, a 17-year-old electronics engineering student killed himself in Jammu and Kashmir in November last year. Four months after his demise, a re-evaluation of the exam paper has found that he had not only passed but had also topped his class in the following subject.
Understandably shattered to hear the news, Hilal's parents feel that this isn't a case of suicide, but a 'murder' as their son had actually secured 48 marks in Physics instead of 28 as declared earlier. Adnan's friends and family claimed that Physics was a subject he used to be a master of, so when he saw that he had failed, he jumped into river Jhelum.
5. May 2015, Muzaffarnagar
Image: dailymail
Those who saw Muzaffarnagar's communal warfare in 2015 knew that "love jihad"( even if it was love and no jihad) was lethal. Imrana Bano and Rajneesh Kumar made this mistake, and then another for thinking that Muzzafarnagar wouldn't want to kill them for it.
This was too much to expect from a town which was perpetually a matchbox waiting to catch fire - just getting back on track a year after the riots that left 59 dead and left over 50,000 homeless - all over a alleged molestation. The parents of Rajneesh, a B.A. first year student knew about their love, and had sent him off to Rohtak, away from Imrana, whereas Imrana’s parents had shipped her off away to relative’s house. Imrana Bano was beaten for talking to Rajneesh, and forced into agreeing to marry someone from Shamli district, with an engagement scheduled for May 1.
