Depressed with her academic performance, an IIT Patna student committed suicide last week by jumping from the roof of her hostel building. Seven suicides in the last eight months at the IITs has caused shock, triggered worry and prompted action. The government has now proposed setting up a task force to study the situation and suggest systemic measures to address the issue.
Entering college can be a difficult transition period in which students may feel lonely, confused, anxious and most importantly stressed leading to depression and consequently suicide (in some cases). However, is academic pressure the sole trigger for students to end their lives?
Ankur Bansal, who went to Indian School of Business, Hyderabad explains that once you get admission, the ugly game begins. In some high rung institutes only a fraction of those who apply get admitted and given the super stringent entry filters only the best of the best get selected to study there.
He says, “What exactly happens is that people who have been toppers all through their lives face competition from all directions. It’s then that they realise that they are average in this league and sometimes below average. For example, if you have 10 people standing in a queue, somebody will have to be 10th, 9th and so on, and the hard reality is that this 10th guy is not dumb. He has been a super student all this while, but gets reduced to a piece of junk in this set-up. A lot of students can’t come to terms with this and take the extreme step.”
Most companies who come to to these institutes to recruit only want to hire from the top 10 per cent, while these recruiters are “Dream Companies” for the whole class.
“Students get coached for many years and get into the course. The course itself is very demanding and they are just not able to cope with the stress of studies and recruitment process. In some cases, they also don’t understand English and that leads to further stress. Hard work alone is not enough to go through the strenuous course,” says Durgadas Sampath, an ex-IITian and IIM post graduate, who is now helming affairs at Pegasus Institute of Excellence, Bengaluru.
Ankush Thakur entered Bhartiya Vidyapeeth College of Engineering with a lot of expectations and dreams. As it turned out, education, like every other business enterprise, also has skeletons in its closet.
Says Ankush, “I found colleges taking on inexperienced and unenthusiastic teachers for low wages. I was frustrated in my search for knowledge. Instead, it seemed as if my college was a giant bus choke-full of passengers, hurtling down an incline whose destination was ‘placement in IT industry’.”