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You cracked JEE. You got into IIT. You made it. Or did you? For years, students have been taught to see an IIT seat as the ultimate finish line, where years of coaching, competition and sacrifice finally pay off. But once they cross that line, the race does not necessarily end. It changes, and from day one, the real test begins inside an IIT.
Years of intense preparation are followed by demanding coursework, constant evaluation, competition with peers and the weight of expectations that can extend far beyond the JEE result.
Inside an IIT classroom, a student who spent years training for JEE can suddenly find themselves surrounded by hundreds of equally high-achieving peers. The benchmark shifts and the completition levels up.
The IIT tag opens doors. But what happens behind those doors is a story far less often told.
RTI responses obtained by IIT Kanpur alumnus Dheeraj Singh, founder of the Global IIT Alumni Support Group offer a sobering picture. A compilation based on RTI responses and media reports records 171 reported student suicides and unnatural deaths across IITs between 2006 and September 2026, 51 in the decade from 2006 to 2015 and 120 between 2016 and September 2026.
Singh also pointed to a notable pattern in the data. His analysis of the past two decades shows a sharp decline in reported IIT student suicides in 2020 and 2021, when campuses were largely shut, classes moved online and examinations were disrupted. Singh has identified academic-linked stress as the โnumber one reasonโ in his analysis of the cases.
The month-wise data shows considerable variation across the year, with October recording the highest number of reported cases at 23, followed by April with 19 and September with 18. The data also points to two distinct periods, with the latter period recording nearly twice as many reported suicides as the earlier one, indicating a marked increase in cases over time.
The figures also suggest a pattern across the academic calendar, with reported suicides tending to dip during session breaks and rise during periods that coincide with examinations, particularly around April and SeptemberโOctober.
But the numbers need to be read carefully. The dataset does not establish why individual students died, and the classification of deaths varies across records. It cannot, therefore, be treated as evidence that academic pressure, or IIT itself, was the cause of these deaths.
That distinction matters.
The question is not simply whether IIT is 'too difficult'. It is whether institutions designed to identify and nurture academic excellence can also create enough room for students to learn at different speeds, struggle without stigma, ask for help and be seen as more than a rank or CGPA.
That question has taken on renewed urgency following the death by suicide of IIT Bombay student Sahil Wakode, whose death is being investigated by the Mumbai Crime Branch amid competing claims about the circumstances surrounding the incident.
The scale of the competition is staggering. More than 15 lakh candidates appear for the JEE Main, but only the top 2.5 lakh successful candidates make the cut for JEE Advanced. Of those who appear for JEE Advanced, only a fraction eventually secure seats in the IIT system.
Behind these numbers are years of coaching, mock tests, rankings, parental expectations and the belief that an IIT seat can transform a student's future.
Professor Sandeep Shukla, Director, IIIT Hyderabad, points to an important disconnect in this journey.
Students who arrive at IIT after years of intensive coaching may be exceptionally trained to solve a particular kind of examination problem. But an IIT classroom demands something different: conceptual understanding, independent thinking, programming, projects, laboratories, teamwork and the ability to approach unfamiliar problems.
"Students can receive the impression in coaching that โonce they get into an IIT or similar institute, their life is set,โ only to encounter a very different academic reality once they arrive," says Shukla.
That transition can be a shock. The student who was among the best in a coaching batch may suddenly find that everyone around them was also among the best wherever they came from.
And that is where the meaning of success can change.
There is evidence that the pressure is not merely anecdotal.
An IIT Bombay survey conducted in 2023 received 350 responses from first-year students. Academic factors accounted for 76 percent of the major stress and discomfort reported in the survey.
Excessive competition was cited by 212 respondents, while difficulty grasping course content and insufficient help from teaching assistants or instructors were also among the concerns raised. The survey followed the death of first-year student Darshan Solanki in February 2023 and subsequently fed into an institutional review of the pressures faced by freshers.
IIT Bombay introduced several changes, including discontinuing the branch-change option at the end of the first year and reconsidering how academic performance was handled for first-year students.
But the larger lesson is perhaps more important than any individual intervention. Academic stress is measurable. Academic stress, however, is not the same thing as a single explanation for suicide.
That distinction needs to remain at the centre of any serious discussion about student mental health.
National data also cautions against explaining student suicides through examinations alone.
Among children below 18 in 2024, 27.7% of recorded suicides were attributed to family problems, 14.9% to love affairs, 12% to illness and 9.6% to failure in examinations. The NCRB's profession-wise data also recorded 14,488 student suicides, accounting for 8.5% of all suicides in 2024.
The numbers do not mean examination pressure is unimportant. They mean the problem is more complicated. A student can arrive on campus carrying pressures that began at home.
Academic difficulty can intersect with financial concerns, relationships, loneliness, discrimination, identity, family expectations or an existing mental-health struggle.
Professor Debabrata Das, Director, IIIT-Bangalore, makes precisely this point. โStudent distress is complex and cannot be attributed to a single factor," he adds.
For institutions, he says, the response must therefore go beyond academic intervention. Easily accessible counselling, peer-support networks and mental-health orientation should become part of the education ecosystem, while students should feel comfortable seeking help without fear of judgement.
That is a crucial shift: from treating distress as an individual weakness to recognising student well-being as part of institutional responsibility.
For parents, an IIT seat can represent the culmination of an enormous investment, financial, emotional and personal. For students, however, the same tag can become a new expectation.
The expectation is no longer simply to get into IIT. It can become: get a good CGPA; secure a top internship; get placed in a major company; earn a high package; pursue higher studies; continue to outperform the cohort.
The pressure can become circular. A student who has spent years being told that an IIT degree will โset upโ their life may find it difficult to admit that they are struggling after getting there.
Shukla also highlights parental expectations around placements, internships and achievement as another source of pressure. He points to loneliness and the changing nature of campus relationships, where students can remain digitally connected to friends and family outside campus without necessarily developing deep support networks inside it.
Professor Charu Jain, Executive Director, COER University, puts it more broadly: โGetting into an IIT is an extraordinary academic achievement, but education cannot stop at academic excellence.โ
That may be the heart of the debate. The IIT system has become exceptionally good at selecting students who can clear one of the world's most competitive entrance examinations. The bigger question is whether it is equally equipped to help those students become adults.
Another part of the conversation often overlooked is that students who struggle academically may not want to leave IIT. They may simply need more time, a different teaching approach or additional support in subjects such as mathematics, programming or language.
The ability to learn at a different pace should not automatically make a student feel like they have failed.
This is where former IIT Delhi director V Ramgopal Raoโs proposal for a five-year BTech becomes relevant. Rao has suggested allowing students who complete the required credits to graduate earlier, while giving those who need more time an extended period to clear back papers, strengthen their fundamentals and complete their coursework.
The idea is not to lower academic standards, but to allow students to progress at different speeds. It also raises a larger question: should every IIT student be expected to reach the same academic destination at exactly the same pace?
The IIT narrative also assumes that getting in and graduating from the institution is the natural endpoint. But that is not always the case. Some students leave.
In one widely discussed example, an IIT Delhi student who later joined Microsoft explained his decision to leave the institute rather than continue pursuing the prestigious degree. The story triggered a broader conversation about whether institutional prestige always aligns with an individual's preferred career path.
Dropping out of an IIT is still treated by much of society as an extraordinary failure because admission itself is considered a once-in-a-lifetime achievement.
But a student's decision to leave can have many explanations: a career opportunity, personal circumstances, academic difficulties, a change in interests or simply a different idea of what they want from life.
The important question is whether the system allows students to make such choices without turning them into cautionary tales.
For decades, the IIT success story has followed a familiar path: JEE rank, IIT admission, good CGPA, internship, placement and a high salary. But students are not machines moving through an academic pipeline. They come with different abilities, backgrounds, preparation levels and emotional needs.
Professor Das argues that institutions must create environments where asking for help is normalised. Shukla takes the argument further, questioning the coaching-driven pathway and proposing a five-year BTech model that could allow greater flexibility in academic progress.
Getting into IIT remains a remarkable achievement, but a JEE rank says little about how a student copes with failure, seeks help, finds belonging or defines their own future. The IIT tag should open doors, not create a single definition of success.
The real measure of an elite institution may be what happens to students after they enterโnot simply how difficult it was to get in.
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