123 - IIT-K forms committee to probe suicide

TNN Sep 23, 2011, 11.04pm IST


KANPUR: Authorities of the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur (IIT-K) have constituted a committee to investigate the suicidal death of Mehtab Ahmed, the first year BTech student of material sciences and engineering. Mehtab ended his life on Thursday by hanging himself from the ceiling fan at his hostel room. He was staying in room number D-307 of Hall IX in a single accommodation room.

Talking to mediapersons, registrar, IIT-Kanpur, Sanjeev S Kashalkar said the committee had been formed to find out the exact cause of Mehtab's suicidal death. He said Prof Omkar Dixit of civil engineering department, Prof AR Harish, head counselling service, Prof MK Ghorai of chemistry department, assistant registrar VP Singh and students' representative Abhinav Prateek were in the fact-finding committee. The panel would submit its report in 10 days.

93 - 1st Dec 2010 - IIT Kanpur to remove booze bottles from hostels to curb suicides- Faking News

Kanpur. After deciding to remove ceiling fans from hostel rooms so that student didn’t commit suicide by hanging themselves, the IIT administration here has now decided to remove all booze bottles that keep lying around in the hostels after daaru-parties, so that students don’t break them and use the glass pieces to cut their veins. Each hostel would have a “bottle collector” effective from the next week.
 

“We’d further identify other objects in and around hostels that could be used by a student to kill himself or herself,” one of the professors informed even as sources suggest that the institute was already running a competition among students to find out “dangerous household items for the depressed”. The winner will receive a cash award of Rs.10,000 and a “Choose Life” T-shirt.

“I have suggested power plug sockets,” says Arindam, a third-year electrical engineering student who is apparently taking part in the aforementioned competition, “any student can insert an electric wire in those sockets and electrocute himself when depressed.”
 

Arindam further informed that earlier he had suggested ways to make life “chill” for a students to that he or she doesn’t take “too much load” about education, but his suggestions were rejected as being “extraneous” to the problem at hand – making it difficult for the students to commit suicide.
But the IIT Kanpur authorities have rubbished such reports and denied that any such completion was taking place. 

Authorities have claimed that their decision to appoint a “bottle collector” in each hostel was taken by a committee comprising of professors after detailed study of the existing challenges that faced the institute.
 

“Do you think these students will ever tell us about their daaru-parties?” retorted professor P K Dhutt, who is also the warden of Hall-07.
 

The authorities didn’t elaborate why they were not addressing the issue of daaru-party (booze binges) and instead focusing on the bottles.
(with inputs from special correspondent Simon)

90 - 30th Nov 2010 - IIT to remove ceiling fans to curb suicides- Indian Express

Kautilya Singh
Posted: Tue Nov 30 2010, 03:59 hrs
Kanpur:

The four-member team at IIT-Kanpur, probing the suicide of Civil Engineering student Madhuri Sale, has come with a plan to help prevent suicides in hostels: replace ceiling fans with pedestal fans.

In the last five years, eight IITians have committed suicide—five of them hanged themselves in their hostel rooms. Another proposal is to end allotment of single rooms to students—now, a student gets a single room from the second year.

Sale, 21, a resident of Nalgonda in Andhra Pradesh and a fourth-year student at IIT-K, hanged herself from the ceiling fan with a rope on November 17.

A four-member committee comprising Prof Omkar Dixit, Prof Mukesh Sharma, Prof A K Ghosh and member of the student gymkhana, C Rahul, was formed to probe the reasons.

A source told The Indian Express: “We have a strong reason to recommend the replacement of ceiling fans with the pedestal fans in the institute hostels. By replacing the ceiling fan with pedestal fans, we can at least remove one option for students who are depressed due to some reasons or the other.”

He claimed that the committee was against the concept of allotting a single room to one student. “With regular interaction with room partners, the students get an opportunity to express their emotions. Even if students are given a room, the wall between two such rooms should be demolished, so that the students get their desired space as well as the company of a fellow student,” he added.

He said that efforts have been made to reduce the Internet “addiction” of students. “The Internet speed has been reduced considerably between midnight and 8 am so that students do not download stuff during this time,” he added.

The panel, however, is yet to find why Sale committed suicide. “Sale was a good student, and had a Cumulative Performance Index (CPI) of 5.8 which is pretty good, and she had done well in most of her exams. She was a brave girl who came from financially poor background and had done considerably well in the past three years,” he said. He asserted that poor academic performance was not the reason behind her suicide.

The faculty member said her suicide was a shock for the faculty as well as the students.

89 - 23rd Nov 2010 -IIT Kanpur mulls steps to prevent student suicides

November 23, 2010
Lucknow: Alarmed by a spate of on-campus suicides, the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur is toying with the idea of restricting round-the-clock internet access, which it says is one of the main causes of these suicides.

"Students spending the whole night surfing the internet often fail to do well because they either miss classes or are too mentally fatigued to understand what is going on in class. Their failure to keep pace with their studies led to the suicides," a senior faculty member told the sources on Monday.

However, the decision to shut down internet services after midnight in the Wi-Fi enabled campus can only be taken after being cleared by the IIT senate, institute registrar S.S. Kashalkar said.

The country's premier engineering school has witnessed as many as eight suicides over the past five years. IANS

86 - 19th Nov 2010 -After suicides, IIT-K to ease academic rules - Indian Express

19th Nov 2010

Anubhuti Vishnoi

Rattled by yet another suicide on campus, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur is set to amend its academic progression rules and ‘rationalise’ the cut-off cumulative performance index from 5 points to 4 points to ease pressure of students.

While the institute claims it is not precisely academic pressure that can be blamed for the recent spate of suicides and several other factors are responsible, they also admit their academic progression rules are one of the most stringent across IITs.

The IIT has already put before its Senate a proposal to amend the existing academic progression rules. It has suggested major changes in the way warning, probation and termination clauses are handed down to students and, most importantly, bringing down the cut-off for getting an IIT degree to the pass percentage of CPI value 4.

The CPI is a measure of a student’s performance in all courses. At IIT Kanpur, if a student passes all the courses, he gets a D, which means a minimum CPI score of 4.0.

But according to current rules at IIT-K, a student needs to get a CPI of 5.0 to graduate. All students who attain a CPI less than 5.0 — and that is a substantial number — are unable to graduate and consequently face academic stress, get warnings, probations and are even terminated.

Now, it has been proposed that the CPI value of 4 itself be made the reference point for a more humane and less stress-free performance appraisal of students. However, provisions for warnings, probations and terminations with appeal have been retained.

43 - 4th July 2008 - IIT blames Internet for suicides - Amity Lounge

LUCKNOW: The Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IIT-K) has blamed enormous Internet surfing and constant use of mobile phones by the students for increasing number of suicides on the campus, officials said.

In a reply to a Right to Information (RTI) application filed June 2 by the institute's alumni association, the premier institute said that as students are in regular touch with their family members, friends and relatives, several thoughts occupy them.

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This in turn, at times, disturbs the students, who do not get peaceful time to study. And later, they take the extreme step for not performing well in the exams.

Earlier, when the mobile phones were not so popular, the students were not able to stay in touch with their families and hence got time to study, officials said.

Also, Internet surfing exposes the students to several sites having information that can cause a negative impact on the minds, leading students to suicides, officials added.

In another reply about the number of suicides, IIT-K said that till date six students of the institute have committed suicide.

Omendra Bharat, an IIT alumni, filed the RTI application to seek information on 14 issues, including the academic norms fixed for preparing the semester result of the students.

The RTI application was filed following the suicide by a student, Ritika Toya Chatterjee.

She killed herself May 30 after she failed in two of her final semester exams, despite having offers to join any of the six Indian Institutes of Management.

"Information regarding the semester grading of students and Ritika's grading is still to be provided along with the reply of twelve other questions we filed through RTI," said Bharat.