Every few months, the same thing happens. A student dies, classmates protest, the institute forms a committee and promises more counsellors, and then things go quiet until the next time. We’re going through it again now. IIT Bombay’s case is with the police, and I won’t comment on facts that are still being investigated. But as an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur, I think we talk far too much about the moment of crisis and far too little about the years that lead up to it.
I remember a wingmate from one of the most competitive departments on campus who changed hostels halfway through. He never said why, and we never asked. He is now a senior leader at a global technology company. It was only years later that I realised how little we knew about what any of us were going through then.
Start with the students who arrive. The head of one leading IIT described meeting a first-year student at another engineering institute who hadn’t had a real conversation with anyone in six years. He had spent all that time in coaching and hadn’t even gone home for Diwali. That is an extreme case, but not an unusual one. Coaching centres train students to eliminate wrong options in multiple-choice tests, not to understand the subject, and they promise that once you get in, life is sorted. So students arrive exhausted, and for the first time in years, nobody is watching over them. One student spent his entire first semester playing video games and failed almost every course. He wasn’t lazy. He had simply believed what he’d been told.
Then the pressure returns, in a different form. Parents call every week, and the question isn’t how their child is doing but what marks they got. Batchmates compare placement offers down to the last lakh. Social media keeps its own running score. The same institute head said something I think many alumni would agree with: the coursework isn’t the hardest part of IIT life. The hardest part is everything else we pile on top of it.
To be fair, some institutes are now taking this seriously. One IIT runs workshops for its entire first-year intake, about 1,400 students, in groups of around 35. The sessions cover sleep, addiction, getting along with people, and thinking about a career. The same institute is cutting faculty advisor groups from about a hundred students to twenty, and keeping each advisor with the same students for all four years so that a real relationship can form. It has also brought in psychiatrists to train its faculty. None of this is expensive, and every institute could do it.
There is a catch, though, and the same head pointed it out himself. Our students are extremely good at passing courses. They can take an ethics course, top it, and come out behaving exactly as before. If wellbeing programmes become one more graded requirement, students will clear them and nothing will change. These programmes only work when students feel cared for, not tested.
Beyond the IITs, the situation is much worse. The Supreme Court’s National Task Force surveyed more than two thousand institutions and found that 65% offer no access to mental health professionals, and 73% have no full-time mental health professional at all. The IITs are among the best-resourced institutions in the country, and even they are struggling.
Inclusivity is where the conversation gets most uncomfortable. Some institute heads argue that caste matters less than isolation, shyness and language. They point to students who studied in Telugu or Marathi and feel lost in English-medium classrooms, whatever their background. That problem is real, and tutorials led by someone who speaks the student’s language, along with focused English training, do help. But students and families keep reporting discrimination too, sometimes through small signals such as being asked about their rank. The task force took this seriously enough to hold separate consultations on caste. Both can be true at once. What doesn’t help is treating either as a distraction from the other. Institutes need an independent cell, a way to report anonymously and published data, so that a complaint doesn’t come down to one student’s word against the institution’s.
Then there’s a harder question: what is an IIT education actually for? At one open house, an institute head asked about 80 undergraduates how many had come because they wanted to be engineers. Around ten raised their hands. When he asked how many were happy to be there, every hand went up. Many students are chasing the brand, not the work. That didn’t matter much when the brand guaranteed a good job. It matters a great deal now.
AI is changing what graduates need. The founder of one of India’s largest software companies says his junior engineers get work done faster with AI but don’t learn the underlying skills, and he is considering restricting their use of it until their foundations are solid. An IIT head made a related point: AI is good at telling you what is already known, but innovation is about what isn’t known yet. Some students now skip lectures, assuming they can ask a chatbot later. The graduates who will do well are the ones with strong basics, good judgement and the ability to recover from failure. An exam-driven system builds almost none of that.
I think the fix begins with what we reward. As a country, we are already obsessed with toppers. So what if the topper were the student who had become most useful to other people by the time they graduated? Part of every student’s evaluation could depend on building something that works, whether a product, a startup, or a solution for a village or a city ward. The value would be judged by the people who use it, which makes it hard to fake. Failure would become something to learn from, not the end of the road. And students would have many different ways to succeed. When marks are the only measure, one bad grade can feel like the end of everything. When there are many measures, it doesn’t.
Some changes are simpler. Institutes can lighten the first-semester load. Advisors can stay with the same students for all four years. JEE can keep moving towards questions that test understanding instead of guessing. And coaching centres and parents need to accept that when a child gets into an IIT, they haven’t reached the finish line. They are only at the start of something much longer.
Kharagpur gave me friends, confidence and a way of working through problems that I still use every day. Every student who gets in deserves the same experience, and deserves to be able to enjoy it.
The writer is a public policy professional and an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur