A third-year student of IIT Kharagpur allegedly hanged himself from the ceiling fan in his hostel room during a video call with a woman friend in Delhi early on Sunday, police said.
Md Asif Quamar, 21, a third-year student of the civil engineering department who stayed in a room of Pundit Madan Mohan Malviya Hall of Residence, was found dead in his room, said an IIT official. He was from Bihar.
According to the official, Asif’s friend called the institution’s security officer at 2.53am on Sunday and told him: “Please help. Mere samney woh hang kar gaya (He hanged himself in front of me).”
The institute’s quick response team rushed to the hostel’s room 133 of SDS block and found the door locked from inside and the lights on.
“A team member stood on a chair and saw Asif hanging through the glass panel above the door. We broke the door open and brought him down. He was declared dead at a hospital in the area,” the official said.
This is the third death of a student on the IIT Kharagpur campus in the past four months.
In January, Shaon Malik from Kasba’s Rajdanga, a third-year BTech student, was found dead in his hostel room when his parents came to meet him.
On April 20, Aniket Walkar, a fourth-year BTech student from Maharashtra, was found hanging.
IIT Kharagpur said in a press release: “At around 2:53am on 4 May, the institute received a call from an external source that Md Asif Quamar has committed self-harm. The security response team immediately rushed to the hall of residence where the student was found dead in his room.”
“An investigation is currently underway by the police to determine the circumstances surrounding this tragic event.....We strongly encourage all the students to take advantage of the well-being support services available at the institute,” the release added.
The death comes at a time when the institute is in the process of constituting a committee that has been tasked to look into the causes responsible for the spate of suicides and suggest if there is any scope to improve the institutional mechanism, which could help in containing the deaths.
The institute decided to constitute the committee after the mother and brother of Aniket Walkar wrote to IIT Kharagpur’s acting director Amit Patra on April 28, urging him to institute an enquiry into the spate of deaths.
“Given the recurrence of deaths on the campus, it seems that IIT should have constituted the committee much earlier,” Sudeep Walkar, the elder brother of Aniket, who graduated from IIT Guwahati in 2022, told Metro on Sunday.
Dheeraj Singh, the founder of the Global IIT Alumni Group, a platform that tracks cases of deaths on the IIT campuses across the county, told this newspaper: “The fact that it took IIT Kharagpur authorities a letter from the family of the deceased student to decide that there is a need to form committee to probe the spate of deaths, suggests that the institute lacks empathy. They are not serious about reaching out to the students in distress and helping them out. Before the death of Aniket and Shaon, another third-year student, Devki Pillai, hanged herself last year,” said Dheeraj.
Amit Patra, the director of the IIT BHU (Varanasi), who has been functioning as the acting director of IIT Kharagpur since January 1, told Metro: “All I can say is better late than never. The urgency to form the committee is being felt more with the death of Asif. Let the committee give its recommendations. We have taken several measures to strengthen our counselling programmes. The deceased student (Asif) did not have any history of visiting our counselling facilities. Let the police carry out their probe”.
Aniket Walkar’s family wrote to the police on April 28 requesting to register an FIR and probe the death independently.
Sudeep Walkar said on Sunday that they have not heard anything from the police.
Calls to the district police superintendent, Dhritiman Sarkar, did not yield any
response.