— ✍️Dr Nilratan Shende
The primary metric of success for India’s premier technical institutions has long been placement packages and global selectivity rankings. Yet, a parallel, devastating index demands our immediate attention: the mounting loss of young students' lives. The recent suicide of Sahil Wakode, a second-year B.Tech. student at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB), is harrowing proof that the environment inside our country’s elite tech sanctuaries has reached boiling point. Sahil’s life ended abruptly following a mid-semester examination room incident where he was allegedly caught with a phone using ChatGPT. Upholding academic integrity is undeniably vital to protecting the value of an education; however, policies enforcing honesty must be executed without weaponizing mistakes or exposing a student to psychological ruin. While the administration characterized the aftermath as counselling, the ensuing student protests reveal a starkly different reality: an environment of panic, immediate fear of systemic ruin, and a punitive culture that weaponizes mistakes rather than correcting them.
Sahil’s passing represents the third death on the IITB campus in the last seven months, and the 16th in the last five years. According to data obtained through an RTI response filed by IIT Kanpur alumnus Dheeraj Singh, a staggering 74 students died by suicide or unnatural causes across 15 IIT campuses nationwide between September 2021 and September 2026. With Sahil’s tragic passing, one more name gets added to the devastating, ever-growing roster of institutional casualties alongside Rohith Vemula, Aniket Aambhore, Darshan Solanki and Dr. Payal Tadvi. This grim lineage forces us to confront a terrifying, recurring question: When will this series of suicide deaths in elite campuses across the country finally stop? When the nation’s brightest minds, having crossed severe socioeconomic hurdles from rural villages to elite metros, choose silence over survival, the crisis is undeniably structural. However, this structural weight is not distributed equally; it falls heaviest on those already navigating deeply entrenched social hierarchies within these elite spaces.
To understand the psychological load borne by marginalized students, one must look closely at the invisible social penalties enforced within these walls. Reports following Sahil's passing reveal that his academic anxiety did not occur in a vacuum. His family alleges he faced persistent campus harassment and derogatory, caste-based slurs. For an academically exceptional student, the sudden collision between an acute institutional crisis and underlying systemic hostility creates an immediate psychological chokehold, proving how rapidly an environment of fear can push a thriving, highly intelligent mind into absolute despair
During my own time pursuing a PhD at IITB focusing precisely on the systemic vulnerabilities of "Poverty, Hunger, and Starvation deaths among Tribes in Maharashtra," I experienced this polarizing reality firsthand. When a few fellow students and I led a pro-reservation hunger strike agitation on campus, the institutional climate shifted overnight. The punishment was not administrative; it was deeply social. Hostel mates deliberately maintained their distance, the everyday warmth of casual interactions evaporated, and some individuals stopped communicating entirely. Walking into the dining hall meant walking into an invisible wall of silence. When a marginalized student faces an academic crisis in an outpost of fear, they do not experience accountability; they experience structural exclusion, demanding an immediate shift from institutional terror to restorative justice.
This social freezing highlights the acute hostility surrounding caste perceptions on elite campuses. For a student from a historically discriminated background, navigating identity does not just invite academic friction; it often results in crushing structural alienation. The sudden withdrawal of basic human connection becomes its own quiet, devastating form of punitive institutional violence.
What exacerbates these tragedies is the glaring lack of sensitivity by the administration when handling crisis situations. Instead of approaching a distressed student with therapeutic care, the administrative machinery frequently defaults to an adversarial, bureaucratic, and cold posture. An allegation of a policy infraction is treated with mechanical judgment rather than a holistic understanding of the student's mental state.
When an administration handles highly vulnerable situations with rigid insensitivity, it shuts down lines of communication and leaves the student feeling entirely cornered. When a student feels the institutional machinery moving to crush their hard-earned future rather than guide them out of a mistake, fatal panic takes over. True administrative leadership requires a shift away from fear-driven policing toward a model rooted in profound pastoral care.
Condolence notes are no longer enough; fixing institutional accountability for these preventable deaths is absolutely critical. For too long, administrations have hidden behind the defence of individual fragility, deflecting blame away from their own structural failures. When a campus environment repeatedly drives its highest-performing students to despair, it must be treated as a systemic failure, not a personal one.
Accountability means that administrators, faculty members, and invigilators must be held legally and professionally liable if their actions cross into psychological intimidation or violate anti-discrimination laws. Internal committees that naturally tend to protect the institution's brand equity must yield to independent, external judicial inquiries. If we do not mandate clear structural consequences for administrative apathy and prejudice, the cycles of institutional trauma will continue unabated.
A truly sensitized campus requires mandatory, periodic anti-bias and empathy training for all stakeholders, including administrative executives, senior faculty, invigilators, and student cohorts. The institution must actively design residential, cultural, and academic frameworks that promote integration and dismantle caste-based clustering, ensuring transparent anti-discrimination cells protect whistleblowers and structurally penalize bias.
To stop this devastating loss of lives, elite institutions must replace punitive terror with intersectional frameworks of restorative justice. First, we must construct independent anti-discrimination infrastructure with autonomous oversight bodies to protect marginalized students from institutional retaliation. Second, we must decolonize campus mental health care, stopping the clinical pathologizing of individual anxiety and treating student panic as a structural symptom of social isolation. True academic excellence cannot survive inside outposts of fear; it demands a foundation of absolute, structural belonging.
We must collectively confront the true cost of our obsession with institutional prestige. Sahil Wakode’s memory demands an unyielding structural commitment to empathy. A system that mints corporate leaders but fails to protect young scholars from discrimination, administrative apathy, and fear is in desperate need of a soul.
-Dr. Nilratan Shende is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB), where he completed his PhD focusing on poverty, hunger, and food security among indigenous tribes in Maharashtra. Also an alumnus of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), he has spent over two decades working at the intersection of developmental research, CSR, and grassroots community empowerment.