Last week, a 2nd-year energy science and engineering BTech student at IIT Bombay reportedly committed suicide a few hours after he had been accused by a professor of allegedly using a phone and ChatGPT during a mid-semester exam. He was the third IIT-B student to die this year. An IIT Kanpur alumnus dataset from RTI replies and media reports counts 171 deaths by suicide and unnatural causes across IITs since 2006, 120 of them in the last decade.
The inconvenient truth is that the prestige that IITs hold is the very thing that is the root cause of these tragic deaths. JEE sorts something like 1.5 mn candidates into a few thousand seats. The ranking it produces is a precise, expensive and widely trusted signal of aptitude. That signal is complete the day the student walks into an IIT campus. Nothing that happens over the next 4 yrs really adds to it.
