72 - 23rd April 2010 - Three students committed suicide in IIT-K in 3 years: Govt - ZEE News

Friday, April 23, 2010, 22:15

New Delhi: Three students of IIT Kanpur have committed suicide during the last three years, the government told the Rajya Sabha today.

Replying to a question, Minister of State for HRD,  D.Purandeswari, however, did not elaborate on the reasons behind students taking the extreme step.

The reasons for some of the cases for taking such extreme step have reportedly been stated in notes left behind by them which are in possession of the police department," she said.

To a question by Anusuiya Uikey, Purandeswari said the academic programme of a few students of the institute have been terminated as they failed to clear the requirements.

Such students may choose to appeal against the decision, she said.

The government has received a few complaints of irregularity and discrimination in IIT-Kanpur. But such complaints have not been substantiated, she said.

-PTI

COMMENTS
Kilkil Sachan - IIT Kanpur
Government is provided with false information or providing false information as eight students of IIT Kanpur have committed suicide in four years under the current administration. As far as the case of expulsion is concerned it is advised by HRD ministry and IITK administration to appeal against decision but the fact is that these terminations are done after appeals, before appeals they had expelled 140 students, there is no equitable criteria for considering appeals in IIT Kanpur.

anuj - kanpur
Here are some of the suicides cases that we would like to bring to your notice. •    November 29, 2004: Swapnil Chandrakant Dhasraskar, second year mechanical at IIT Kanpur jumps to death from a IIT Kanpur building. •    May 3,2006: Shailesh Kumar 23 years old student of chemical engineering department(dual degree) iit kanpur hangs himself to death. •    October 9, 2006: Anjan Kumar, second year, Chemical, IIT Kanpur. •    November 6, 2006: Abhilash JJ, a PhD scholar from Kerala, pursuing doctoral studies at IIT Kanpur. commits suicide by consuming poison. •    April 25, 2007: J Bharadwaj iit kanpur student jumps before a moving train. •    April 19, 2008: Prashant Kumar, first year student of electrical engineering, IIT Kanpur hangs himself to death in his hostel room. •    May 31 2008 Toya Chatterjee The 22-year-old bio-engineering final year student from Tollygunge commit suicide hanging herself in hostel room. •    January 3, 2009: G. Suman, second year M.Tech electrical engineering student, IIT Kanpur commit suicide hanging himself in hostel room.

17 - 22nd May 2006 - The life of an IIT Kanpur Student - IITK Student Blogspot

MONDAY, MAY 22, 2006
 

The F List

 
It had been a long time since I have been away from this site. But the recent suicide pulled me back to this. Before I dwell upon the suicide issue,I would rise a point about an important point -a point so frequently being raised in many forums ONLY inside IITK-The F List

To those of you who are not aware of what a F list is,here it goes-The F list is the list of the candidates who got an F(fail) grade in the subject. A common list is prepared for all the courses and is displayed near the UG office.Its updated everyday,right from the day the first course's grades get submitted.As such,its a common phenomena of displaying the F-list even before the exams get over in the first place for many.

The issue raised is this-The public display of ones so called "failure" effects ones ego and blah blah blah.............First-Yes, I agree that the display of the F list during the exam time is not a good idea. Do it after all the exams are over.This is feasible,as the exam dates' range is fixed.Now,some poppers who project themselves as the sympathisers of the downtrodden section-namely the F awardees give a solution for this as follows.-Dont display the F list at all and intimate the students through councellers aka sgs(another bunch of assholes,more about this later).This is a complete stupid way of doing thisngs.These poppers need to be chopped off.There are very few things the administration if IITK does right ,and these poppers want to wrong those too.The reason why I oppose this stupid idea is precisely this- Not all students who get an F expect an F beforehand,or atleast fear of one.This is particularly rampant in the IITKanpur ,thanx to the professors who keep changing the weightage of the course contents according to their whimps and fancies at any time without even making a formal announcement.You might popup and say-Hey buddy,where are you-the IITK constitution says that the weightage of different exams and other evalutaions has to be disclosed in the first week of the course.Me-Welcome to IITKanpur.Rules are the tools for manipulating you ,vested in the hands of the profs by profs,not for you to sheild or yield.In such cases,more often than not,its the students friends who happen to see his name in the F list and inform him by some means.This would give time for the student to plan his next semester-which courses to drop and which to take-And beleive me this is not an easy process.This phenomena becomes more severe for the AP(Academic Probation) students and the warning students,who have many things to do.If the guy gets to know that he got an F,he could save his termination by appealing to the human side of the other professor.You could challenge this reason-but I stick to my guns.And in case he is terminated,he has gonna do a lot of things,convince the parents that this is not the end of life and so on and on.....A direct termination letter in the hands of the parents without prior informing them is definitely not a confortable situation for the mental state of the student.
Ask any guy who has ever gotten an F or is under a probation or a warning,and 99 out of 100 will concur with my viewpoint.

So,my appeal to all those self-projected sympathisers of the self-seen F-listers as downtrodders is this- Stop this stupid request of asking the adminstration not to display the F list.It has more harm than good.And if you want to do something for the well being of the F lister,go ask them ,dont just keep farting at will .
posted by IIT Kanpur | 9:40 PM | 0 comments 
MONDAY, DECEMBER 05, 2005
Suicide in IIT Kanpur
@Bloggers -Thanx for your continued support and comments.


Most of you might have heard about the suicide in IIT Kanpur.If you didn't you might want to go through the the search via google.It gives some good enough and some masala links .

http://www.google.co.in/search?q=iit+kanpur+suicide

The student -Swapnil is from Nagpur,studying mechanical 2nd year at IITKanpur

Firstly,Is this a suicide?Facts first and then opinions follow. The boy's body was found near the JEE office(part of the faculty building).The autopsy report indicates that the right rib cage is heavily fractured and so is the left leg.And a few (4 I guess) teeth were broken.No major injuries anywhere else.One of my friends who saw the body reported seeing some blood(very little) near his nose.Blood near nose is quite common,in any case of accident.That he fell from the faculty building is beyond doubt.Thats the only way you can express such multiple fractures.But did he die because of those injuries???? I am forced to doubt.My experience says that a person dies from falling only when there is some injury to the head-The crucial part of the body.If one gets injured at other parts,its unlikely to lead to death(immediate death in this case).
The IIT Kanpur administration rested down the case saying its a suicide but the police refused to eat the cake.They are investigating.Though the logical part of my brain doubts if it is a suicide,my human nature is forcing me to accept it as a suicide.Reasons will follow in the next post,which I am posting immediately
posted by IIT Kanpur | 8:57 AM | 0 comments 
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2005
First Post
May be its not the right time to start a posting,considering that its exam time here.But,then,I thought I might as well put down a few rants.
posted by IIT Kanpur | 11:15 AM | 1 comments 
Life in IIT Kanpur
Fuck IITK.
This place sucked the juice out of my life.I am no more than a mere skeleton+flesh moving with no grace,with depression and humiliation taking the place of confidence and humility in me.
After seeing a recent article on a IIT Bombay student committing suicide,may be most of the outsiders,or even some insiders are surprised by it,but not me.I can imagine the life of torture and humiliation that nukkala(thats his surname) has been living,since my life in iitk is more or less close to him,if not same.
One senseless,but typical proffessor of IIT was commenting -""Every student making it to IIT is good. So when the best start competing with each other the pressure is bound to increase. Some take it in their stride, while a few succumb to it in some way or the other"

This is the best joke I have had in weeks.LOL. First,about competetion in IIT.Sure,some of the best students come to iitk,but they no more remain so.Competetion is none here.All the students are in search for new ways of getting easy grades and plagiarism and cheating rule the iitian life... I dont mean to say that all the students cheat.Yes,there are some sincere and studious students who give their 200% for a work.But they are 1 in 50.Yes,1 in 50. The remaining students can be broadly categorised into two categories -- One group,which learned the tactics of surviving in the iit system,i.e. successfully accomplishing in their acads(Read as "Not necessarily good at acads"),i.e getting good CPI's(Percentages)-The other group which keeps fighting with mud,who haven't learned how to get good grades.Honest and sincere ppl lie in both groups.I ,for one,am a member of the second group. So,in no way is there a competetion in IITK.Every one(almost) tries to get good grades by mean methods(mean to the heart,not necessarily to the law). Where then is the competetion that the professor talked about?

And yes,when you are a member of the elite! second group,you get shunned by every professor.Some keep their fight ,some resign-resign to the pressure to succeed-resign to the pressure of doing something their heart refuses to do-resign to the pressure of showing off something thats not original(plagiarism). Those that resign to the pressure will more or less succeed-in the iitk terms.Those that put the fight will sooner or later realise that they are fighting a loosing battle.They will eventually realise that its too late for them to change their personality and way of life.They will eventually end up with horrible grades,often getting their degrees extended or getting terminated...

Coming back to the case of Vijay Nukkala,the IITB student who committed suicide,he is not the only one who is dissatisfied with the branch that he got . 70 % of the students here dont get the branches that they want.And around 10% of the students dont choose the right branch,eventhough they have the option.I fall in the later category,as i secured a rank which is eligible for any branch in IIT. And the rest 30% " love the branch they get"- That's the phrase used .I would rather replace that phrase by "study that branch,for they dont know how to love-They dont even know what a feeling is-be it love or liking.They just do what they have to,or what they are trained to.They are the machines of the society without thoughts"

16 - 17th May 2006 - The tyranny of Exams by Sandeep Pandey - Indian Express

The tyranny of examinations
Sandeep Pandey
Posted online: Wednesday, May 17, 2006 at 0000 hrs

There certainly are more non-intrusive ways of finding out how much a student knows

Recently IIT Kanpur (IIT-K) witnessed its second student suicide in the past six months. Shailesh Sharma could not face the ignominy of failing in two courses and hanged himself on May 4. Earlier, Swapnil Dharaskar ended his life on November 30. It is quite well-known that to get into the IITs and survive a degree course there involves an excruciating,
almost inhumane, process. These suicides, the outrage among students and the defence of the IIT examination system by the faculty prompt me to narrate my experience with experimenting with the IIT Kanpur examination
system as a faculty member in ’93. The only course that I independently taught at IIT during my three-semester stay there was Control Systems for the final year Mechanical Engineering students.

Being a Gandhian by orientation, I firmly believe that examinations should be abolished. As a member of the Central Advisory Board on Education of the present government I have also raised the question in Delhi about the link between education and examinations. Personally I
have never understood why — if the purpose of education is to acquire knowledge — it is necessary to pass or fail students by subjecting them to the examination process. I told my students that, as professor, my job would not be considered complete until I was able to make each of my
students understand the subject I was teaching.

Examinations were a bureaucratic procedure which should not have anything to do with a professor. If a student failed an examination, the failure must be considered that of the professor and not that of a student. Although the student needs to put in efforts, it is for the professor to ensure that he comprehends what is being taught. If a student is lagging behind, or not doing well in a particular subject, it is the responsibility of the professor to ensure that the student
catches up. Ideally, I would have liked to avoid examinations. But since I had to turn in a list of grades at the end of the semester, I came up with what I thought was the best possible compromise. I told my students that they would get unlimited chances to appear in an examination — which was not a written one — and the process will be complete only when
they felt that they had put in their best performance.

The idea was to make students learn the subject at their own pace. Since I wanted my students to learn the subject, I decided to spend about 15 minutes with each to make them feel comfortable. If I saw that they had not put in their best, I would advise them to take the examination again. Sometimes the request for a repeat examination would come from them. Initially, I was apprehensive about the process going on
indefinitely for some. But to my surprise no student took more than three chances. Four students came to me and told me that they were not interested in the subject. Since it was likely that they were interested in other subjects and wanted to spend more time on them, I decided to pass them with a ‘C’ grade. The rest got ‘A’s and ‘B’s.

Professor S.G. Dhande, the present director of IIT-K, and then head of Mechanical Engineering decided to discuss my experiment with the examination system at the weekly departmental meeting. There was a furore. Most faculty members were aghast that I could adopt such a “subjective” way of grading. I was asked how would I keep a proof of the
performance if any student decided to challenge the grade awarded. But I explained that nobody could have any complaints in my system, because they had already put in their best. There were only a handful of younger faculty members who supported me, quoting the tradition of academic autonomy at IIT-K. I was told by senior faculty members that I should not repeat my experiment and must conduct a written examination the next time. I was of course not happy with this and revolted by conducting the next examination as a written one, but allowing unlimited time and a five-minute consultation mid-way for those who got stuck somewhere. The students had no complaints. I think some enjoyed the process as well as subject and I was happy to have conducted a humane examination.

But I remain a strong advocate of delinking the learning process from examinations. There are more non-intrusive ways of finding out how much a student knows if the purpose of examinations is only to evaluate the student. And when it comes to applying for jobs, employers would in any case conduct their own tests. People have already started thinking about it. Some of the most progressive schools considered are those which de-emphasise competition and concentrate on the development of humane values. If we want our students to become more sensitive to themselves and fellow human beings we must have an education system that does not destroy their sense of self-worth.
____________________________________

The writer did his doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a Magsaysay awardee

15 - 9th May 2006 - Suicide attempt: IITK

NEW DELHI, India, May 9 -- A FIRST year student of IIT, Kanpur, had to be hospitalised in a serious condition after he tried to kill himself in the campus.

Dean of Student Affairs Prawal Sinha confirmed the incident and said the institute may now engage professional counsellors to check the rising trend.

IIT Kanpur is in process of a soul search after two students - Swapnil Dharasker and Shailesh Sharma - ended their lives in less than six months. 

8 - 4th Dec 2005 - Beautiful minds: The despair behind the IIT suicides -Source-DNA India

Published: Sunday, Dec 4, 2005, 20:26 IST
Agency: DNA


IITians who succumbed:

Lokesh Chand, a third year student Electronics Engineering at IIT Roorkee hung himself in his room on November 11, 2005
Swapnil Chandrakant Dharaskar, a second-year student of mechanical engineering at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, jumped to his death on November 16, 2005
Vijay Nukala from IIT-Powai, Mumbai from finaly year Physics hung himself from the fan on November 16, 2005
I don't believe that the amount of pressure faced by the students is unbearable. If anything, the stress while preparing for the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) is much more. Any person who gets through the JEE can sail through the engineering programme with much ease. What is a cause of worry is the way a lot of students spend their free time these days. Instead of using time for recreation outdoors, many are glued to their computer sceen. This eventually affects the grades and piles up the stress. — Lalit Solanki

I wonder what’s all the talk about IIT students being overworked and stressed. Anyone who puts in a modest amount of effort can fare well in the exams. Even if you fail in a paper, you have ample of time to clear it. I think people who eventually get stressed out are the ones who get distracted mid-way. All you have to do is be regular with your studies, which is not asking for too much considering that IIT-Powai is one of the best institutes in the business. — Hemant Kumar

We must look closely before we accuse the IIT and its systems of murder. Often, the pressure comes from family and friends. Nevertheless, the institute has a fantastic support system should a problem arise. We usually discuss our problems with our seniors who guide us through. We also have faculty advisors who are specifically designated to solve our problems. They are very friendly and approachable and most of the issues get resolved once we talk it out with them. We have provisions for professional counselling, should all else fail. — Nitesh Gawali

I see no problem with the system which has been tried and tested for decades. This is the same system that has churned out geniuses time and again. I think the problem begins when people come in to the institute with vague assumptions and expectations. If you come in with the aim of learning, the institute has a tremendous amount to offer. Unfortunately, a few people see the IIT as a sophisticated employment bureau. They see this as a means to earn a lucrative job and this perspective can be hazardous. This tends to make people focus too much on the grades and they miss out on a lot of learning in the process. The IIT does expect a lot out of its students, but by no stretch of imagination is it unreasonable. There's no point blaming the system for everything that goes wrong. There may be a few drawbacks, but there seems to be no fundamental flaw in it. — Aditya Paranjape

A few people do complain about the stress they face in the IIT and that is only fair. However, there are many other ways to deal with the pressure than ending one's life. Low grades seems to be the prime source of stress. However, it would be unwise to attribute suicides to poor scores only. There is a combination of factors which include academic and personal which add up to the stress. A lot of students arrive with unreal expectations from the institute and the conflict between what they expect and what they face can lead to stress.

Different people react differently to stress and it is not always the system that's at fault. When you come in with the object of landing a job at the end of the fourth year, you tend to take it easy in the beginning.

Eventually, after three years you realise that you have learnt little and that can really stress you out. The system has worked over the years but it must keep evolving with time to deliver the best results. — Ashivni Shekhawas

7 - 2nd Dec 2005 - Mystery shrouds IIT-K student’s death- Source- Express India

Rao Jaswant Singh
Posted: Dec 02, 2005 at 1202 hrs IST


A day after his body was found near the institute’s academic block, mystery still shrouds the death of Swapnil Chandrakant Dharaskar, the 21-year-old Mechanical Engineering student of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IIT-K).
While the IIT administration declared it a suicide case, the police report, based on the post-mortem findings, do not support this theory. Even his parents, who arrived from Nagpur today, and his hostel mates found it improbable.

Swapnil’s father, Chandrakant Dharaskar, along with his wife and relatives reached the city today to claim his son’s body today. Talking to Express, he said he had visited Swapnil at IIT-K last month, from November 6-9.

Swapnil was very normal then, he said, adding, ‘‘I talked to him about his studies and other general topics. He did not appear tense.’’

Chandrakant said there was no reason for Swapnil to commit suicide. He said his son was very hard-working. He had secured 90 per cent marks in his Class XII examination and had cleared the IIT-JEE exam in his first attempt.

‘‘Swapnil had to come to Nagpur on the day he died,’’ he murmured, with tears in his eyes.

Police said they had found a letter in Swapnil’s room, written by his sister, advising him to concentrate on his studies and not worry about issues at home.

Meanwhile, Swapni’s roommate, Krishna Khandelwal, claimed that the deceased had seemed tense about his Chemistry paper which was held yesterday. ‘‘I had never seen him so worried before,’’ he added. Stating that Swapnil always completed his syllabus days before the exam, this time he could not do so. Amidst the unanswered questions, Swapnil’s body was cremated at Bithoor on Thursday.

6- 30th Nov 2005 - Stressed' IIT student commits suicide -Source- TOI

TNN, Nov 30, 2005, 11.55pm IST
 
KANPUR: Swapnil Chandrakant Dharaskar, a second-year student of mechanical engineering at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, on Wednesday committed suicide barely half-an-hour before he was to appear for his chemistry second semester exam.

Though the cause of his death could not be ascertained, it appears as though Swapnil — Roll no: Y4137 — killed himself by jumping off a building.

His body was found by sweeper Ram Kishan outside the administrative office building — which is about 60 feet high — at 7.30 am.

IIT campus doctor Mamta Vyas, who initially examined the body, declared Chandrakant dead. Later Dr S N Bajpai and Dr Mumuksh Dixit, who conducted the autopsy, said Swapnil's right-side ribs and four teeth were broken and left leg was fractured, suggesting that he may have jumped or fallen from the top-storey of the building.

His viscera has been preserved for further forensic examinations, but circumstantial evidence suggests he might have committed suicide, sources said.

Soon after the news broke about Swapnil's death, IIT authorities sealed room number 203 of Hall-2 where the deceased used to reside and students were strictly told not to interact with the media.

Dean of Students Affairs (DOSA) Prawaal Sinha said the real cause of death could be ascertained only after forensic reports were received.

But he said the student might have committed suicide due to stress. "IIT exams are undoubtedly stressful and the boy might have committed suicide due to the same reason," he said.

Sinha also added that hardly half-an-hour before the incident, the boy had spoken to his Nagpur-based father Chandrakant Dharaskar at length and apprised him about his examinations and was scheduled to go home on December 4 and return on December 24.