IIT Kharagpur will make an effort to engage with students so they do not feel left out and end their lives, the institute’s new director said on Monday.
With three student deaths on campus in the past seven months, there is an urgent need to plug the gaps in the mechanism that is in place and ensure student well-being, director Suman Chakraborty said.
“We need to find out why the students are in distress. Distress prompts them to take drastic steps. If we can detect and resolve that by engaging with them through a system that will have a technical intervention and humane approach, this could lessen the chances of students ending their lives,” the director said on the eve of the institute’s annual convocation.
The deaths of the three BTech students on campus this year alone have raised questions about the lack of a robust institutional mechanism to prevent such
incidents.
On May 10, the institute announced a 10-member committee to probe the spate of deaths and recommend measures to ensure student well-being.
The committee was formed after the mother and brother of Aniket Walkar, one of the three deceased students, wrote to Amit Patra, then-acting director of the institute, urging him to constitute a panel.
Suman Chakraborty, a former student of Jadavpur University and a professor of mechanical engineering at IIT Kharagpur, was appointed a full-term director of the institute in mid-June.
“It is painful for us to lose students who are like our children. We have put in effort to stop this. The institute has outlined programmes towards this direction,” said Chakraborty.
The programmes include a student wellness and engagement framework called “Support, Empathy, Transformation and Upliftment (Setu)”.
The director said Setu means bridge, intended to connect two realms — isolation to inclusion, distress to resilience.
According to an IIT official, the institute was trying to scale up its mental health programme and develop an AI-powered health monitoring tool. The institute is also trying to reach out to students by encouraging peer mentorship and peer-bonding so that the authorities can determine whether a student is going through any hardship and has turned vulnerable.
“IIT Kharagpur has 20,000 students. So, to reach out to such a large pool, we have to try different models. We need to scale up,” said Chakraborty.
But is scalability the only solution? Is there not a need for the IIT Kharagpur administration to show empathy, considering that the family members of a deceased student had to write to the IIT administration to take steps to probe and stop deaths?
“If we have erred, I can say we will try not to repeat the mistakes. We will take lessons from them and move forward,” said Chakraborty.
Convocation
In its 71st convocation, IIT Kharagpur will award degrees to 3,731 students on Tuesday. Former ISRO chairman S. Somnath will be the chief guest on the occasion.