A student of IIT Delhi from Jharkhand was found dead in his hostel room on Wednesday in a case of suspected suicide because of poor academic performance.

Kumar Yash, 21, was found hanging from the ceiling fan of his hostel room. No suicide note was found. However, police said Yash was undergoing psychiatric treatment and that his poor academic performance might have driven him to take the extreme step.

Yash was pursuing MSc in cognitive science under the department of humanities and social sciences. His friends said his grade point average for the second semester was one out of 10.

“He has failed in most of the papers. He was upset about it. The institute did not do much to address his concerns over his poor academic performance,” Yash’s friend said.

This is the second suspected suicide at IIT Delhi in 2024. In February, an MTech student had allegedly died by suicide.

In a statement, IIT Delhi said Delhi police were investigating the incident and that the institute was fully committed to ensuring the mental and physical well-being of its students.

In the last 10 months, 12 cases of suspected suicides have been reported from seven IITs.

Dheeraj Singh, an alumnus of IIT Kanpur, said 143 IIT students have died by suicide in the last 20 years, including 42 between 2005 and 2014 and 101 between 2014 and 2024.

“Given the seriousness of the problem, the education ministry and the IITs must set up an independent external experts fact-finding committee that establishes accountability and more importantly suggests remedial measures for the future. No IIT stakeholder should be part of this committee,” Singh said.

A former faculty member at IIT Kharagpur, Prof Rajeev Kumar, said the students were caught between academic pressure and aspirations of the society. “The institutes adopt an apathetic attitude to the students’ concerns. Each institute has put in place counselling and mental support facilities overseen by academic administration. But such ad hoc measures didn’t succeed,” he said.