IIT Kanpur alumnus and IndiGo co-founder Rakesh Gangwal
| Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

Expressing concern over recurring student suicides across Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the Central Information Commission (CIC) has directed the institutions to constitute high-level committees to recommend measures for preventing such deaths and mitigating the factors that contribute to them.

The direction came while disposing of appeals filed by Dheeraj Kumar Singh, an alumnus of IIT-Kanpur and founder of a non-governmental organisation (NGO) engaged in student rehabilitation and mental health counselling.

Mr. Singh, under the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005, had sought details regarding the students, research scholars, and staff who ended their lives at IIT-Madras, IIT-Kanpur, IIT-Goa, and IIT-Jodhpur since January 1, 2005.

He wanted information including age, gender, caste/category, academic programme, native State, date of suicide, and whether the death occurred on the campus. Stating that the details were required for academic research, he said the names of the deceased could be withheld if necessary.

Details withheld

In response, IIT-Madras informed him that seven suicides had been reported between 2019 and June 26, 2025, but declined to disclose personal details, such as age and caste, citing the exemption under Section 8(1)(j) of the Act relating to personal information. The First Appellate Authority upheld the decision. IIT-Kanpur informed the applicant that 17 suicides had been reported between 2005 and 2025. The data furnished by the institute showed that at least one suicide was reported every year during the period, with three cases recorded in 2024. However, it too withheld the personal particulars of the deceased under Section 8(1)(j).

Similarly, IIT-Goa denied disclosure of personal information, describing it as third-party information exempt from disclosure, while IIT-Jodhpur informed the applicant that no such cases had been reported. Aggrieved over the denial of complete information, Mr. Singh moved an appeal before the CIC. He contended that the information he had called for was essential to analyse the root causes of student suicides across factors such as age, gender, and social category, and would help strengthen his organisation’s mental health counselling programmes for students facing academic and personal stress.

The information was crucial to strengthen the NGO’s programmes for uplift and counselling of students. The IITs, however, maintained that disclosure of the age, caste, and identity of deceased students would violate the privacy of the individuals and their families.

Referring to the Supreme Court’s judgment in the Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) versus Union of India case, provisions of the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017, and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, the institutions argued that such information constituted protected personal data and could not be disclosed in the absence of an overriding public interest.

Central Information Commissioner Sudha Rani Relangi said the institutes had already furnished information, including the number of deaths, date of occurrence, gender, native place, and place of death, while withholding names, age and caste/category on privacy grounds. The replies of the Central Public Information Officers were legally sustainable.

‘Persistent crisis’

However, the Commission expressed concern over the continuing incidence of suicides on campuses of IITs.

Referring to the “persistent crisis” of multiple suicides reported annually across several IITs, particularly at campuses such as IIT-Kanpur and IIT-Kharagpur, it observed that there was an urgent need for institutions to strengthen preventive mechanisms.

The Commission directed IITs to constitute high-level committees, where such bodies have not already been formed, to identify and recommend measures to mitigate the factors contributing to student suicides.

It also asked that information relating to the constitution of these committees be proactively disclosed on the institutes’ official websites, in line with the RTI Act. The direction was in tune with the observations of the Supreme Court in the Kishan Chand Jain versus Union of India case.

(Assistance for overcoming suicidal thoughts is available on the State’s health helpline 104, Tele-MANAS 14416. and Sneha’s suicide prevention helpline 044-24640050)

Published – July 19, 2026 10:49 pm IST

Kanpur:

A 28-year-old PhD student at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur ended her life by hanging herself from the ceiling hook here on Thursday, the fourth such case in the last one year, police said.

Pragati Kharya, a resident of Sanigawan in Kanpur who was pursuing a PhD in Earth Sciences, died bt suicide inside her hostel room D-116 in hall number-4 during the intervening night, but the matter came to light on Thursday noon, they said.

Her hostel mates informed the IIT-K authorities who in turn alerted the police.

In a statement, IIT Kanpur said with profound grief it mourns the tragic and untimely demise of Pragati Kharya.

Pragati Kharya joined the PhD program in December 2021, it said.

“A police forensic team has visited the campus to investigate the circumstances of the death. The Institute is awaiting the results of the police investigation to determine the cause. With Pragati Kharya’s passing, the institute has lost a promising young researcher. The institute extends its deepest condolences and prays for strength and comfort to her family and friends in this time of great loss,” the IIT said.

“The police received information about a suicide by a PhD student at around 12 pm today,” Deputy Commissioner of Police (West) Rajesh Kumar Singh told PTI.

Assistant CP (Kalyanpur) Abhishek Pandey said, “After getting information about the suicide police rushed there and found the door of Pragati’s room was locked from inside.” “After breaking open the door, they found the woman’s body hanging from the ceiling fan,” he added.

The police said a forensic team was called to collect the forensic evidences.

The suicide note written in which she held no one responsible for her extreme step has been recovered from the room, the ACP added.

A mobile phone was also recovered from the hostel room that might help police in solving the mystery behind the suicide, the ACP said, adding, possible reasons behind suicide will only be revealed after a preliminary probe and completing other formalities.

The body was sent to the mortuary for post-mortem. The family members have also arrived at the IIT-K, according to the police.

On January 18, 29-year-old PhD student, Priyanka Jaiswal, who was pursuing a PhD in Chemical engineering had allegedly committed suicide inside her hostel room after being locked from inside.

On January 11, M.Tech second-year student Vikas Kumar Meena (31) allegedly hanged himself from the ceiling fan in his IIT, Kanpur hostel room, reportedly after he was “temporarily” barred from continuing with his course.

On December 19, postdoctoral researcher Pallavi Chilka (34) hanged herself from the ceiling fan of her second-floor hostel room on the campus.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

At Rajiv Sinha’s laboratory in IIT Kanpur lie soil, sand, and rocks drilled out from across thousands of metres under the Karnali, Ganga, and Kosi rivers. Each sample, called a “sedimentary core” is held in a container 7.6 cm wide; together, they create snapshots of the rivers’ ancient history.

Every centimetre of these cores reveals the size and kind of sediment that the rivers were carrying at a point in time. The cores thus show how the composition of these sediments changed over time.

New study

These cores have proved crucial to Prof. Sinha and a team of geologists from the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, who are reconstructing river floods in the Gangetic plain between 23 and 5 million years ago, in the Miocene era.

Based on these studies, the researchers have reported that climate-change-related and seismic events ravaging the planet today could create super-floods that could be catastrophic for people in the Gangetic plain, in a paper published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment on August 23.

The findings signal that we need to urgently update India’s disaster management strategy to account for what Prof. Sinha calls “cascading hazards”: natural disasters that are triggered by other disasters.

Delayed transition

The study began with a peculiar observation.

As rivers flow from their origins in the mountains to the plains, they carry rocks, gravel, and sand. The heavier particles – rocks and gravel – settle down earlier in the river’s trajectory whereas the lighter particles settle later. The part of the river’s path where there is a gradual transition from heavier to lighter particles on the riverbed is called the gravel-sand transition.

With the river Ganga, for example, Prof. Sinha said that larger particles are restricted to the areas around Haridwar and Rishikesh, in Uttarakhand. In normal circumstances, large particles should not be usually found in downstream areas.

But in a 2014 study, Prof. Sinha and colleagues reported that, around 11,000 years ago, in the Holocene era, there was coarse gravel in the Kosi river some 30-40 km downstream of the current gravel-sand transition. His team inferred this from sedimentary cores.

At the Mohand anticline

The team’s investigation of this anomaly – such large particles downstream of the current transition spot – took the team to the Mohand anticline in Uttarakhand, around 45 km southwest of Dehradun.

An anticline is a fold in a sedimentary rock that bulges outwards. Older layers of sediments are found towards the centre and the younger ones are located towards the exterior.

At the Mohand anticline, the team documented all the layers and recorded the size and type of the sediments in each. The researchers estimated when each sediment layer was deposited based on how deep it was. By combining this data with that obtained from the drilled cores, they could compute the rivers’ flow at different times.

An ancient event

That’s how they landed at one potential reason the coarse gravel in the Kosi was so far away from the modern gravel-sand transition: an “extreme monsoon event” leading to a flood that occurs every 200-1,000 years.

This extreme event is expected to have occurred along with a complementary cause called hyperconcentrated flows. Hyperconcentrated flows occur when some event – a trigger, like a landslide or a glacial lake outburst – causes the river to carry more sediments than usual. In such conditions, “high concentrations of sediments are distributed through the water column,” according to the paper.

Hyperconcentrated flows can change the way rivers flow, so they often have devastating consequences.

“A major landslide combined with a heavy monsoon can generate hyperconcentrated flows, which can actually move very large particles further downstream,” Prof. Sinha said. As a result, the river could be clogged, the water level could rise to dangerous levels, and cause a flood.

Hyperconcentrated flows can also change the course of the river in a process called avulsion, forcing thousands of people to move. When the Kosi river avulsed in 2008, it deposited around 2 metres of sediment in the surrounding land, inundated and destroyed crops, left the soil infertile, and created conditions conducive to the spread of disease.

Old threat, new risk

In early 2021, a large rock and ice avalanche triggered a disastrous flood in Chamoli district, leaving more than 200 people dead or missing. According to Prof. Sinha, the incident, like several others in Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand in 2023, is a reminder of how areas prone to landslides and heavy monsoons are especially vulnerable to hyperconcentrated flows.

The odds of an extreme monsoon event in the same regions are expected to increase due to climate change. According to a 2021 study in western Nepal, the chance could increase by as much as 60%. More extreme rains could also mean more landslides, which in turn could mean hyperconcentrated flows leading floods downstream in the plains.

‘Cascading hazards’

Prof. Sinha and his colleagues wrote in their paper that accounting for hyperconcentrated flows in “future disaster risk management strategies remains an important and major challenge”. This is because, he added, India’s disaster management strategy relies largely on a “compartmentalised” understanding of disasters, where how one disaster leads to the other is not taken into consideration.

“If we keep looking at these hazards in an isolated and compartmentalised way, we will never be able to understand the entire cascading effect of a disaster,” he said. Instead, we need an “integrated disaster management approach” where the relationship between instances of earthquakes, landslides, and floods – along with the individual incidents themselves – is used to frame risk-mitigation plans.

Sayantan Datta (they/them) are a queer-trans freelance science writer, communicator and journalist. They are currently a faculty member at Krea University and tweet at @queersprings.