A 21-year-old male student of IIT Bombay allegedly committed suicide by jumping from the hostel terrace in the wee hours of Wednesday, police said.
The incident occurred at around 1 am at the hostel located in Mumbai's Powai area.
Naman Agarwal, a second-year engineering student at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, allegedly jumped from the terrace of hostel no. 4. The reason behind the extreme step is yet to be ascertained, a Powai police official said.
The student was a native of Pilani in Rajasthan.
Based on the primary information, the police registered an Accidental Death Report (ADR) and were conducting a probe into the incident, the official added.
Last month, a 25-year-old PhD scholar at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur died after allegedly jumping from the sixth floor of a residential building on the campus.
Ramswroop Ishram, a research scholar in the Department of Earth Sciences, lived in the New SBRA residential building with his wife and three-year-old daughter. Officials had said he was suffering from depression.
Notably, in March 2025, the Supreme Court of India constituted a National Task Force (NTF) on the mental health of students and the prevention of suicides in higher education institutions.
As part of its mandate, the task force conducted a nationwide survey on student well-being, which received over 16 lakh responses. In its report, the NTF noted that around 65 per cent of institutions surveyed did not have access to mental health professionals, while nearly three-quarters lacked full-time counsellors.
Acting on the report, the apex court on January 16, 2026, issued a series of directions holding institutions responsible for taking steps to prevent suicides. The court stated that higher education institutions cannot remove students from hostels or bar them from classes or examinations due to delays in scholarship disbursal.
It also directed colleges to report all “unnatural deaths" to the police, including those occurring off campus and irrespective of the mode of study. The directions apply to students enrolled in online programmes as well.