Abhijit Mukherjee (top) and father Ashish

Calcutta, April 17: A 22-year-old Infosys trainee from Howrah has committed suicide on the company’s Mysore campus, apparently unable to cope with the tight training schedule and frequent assessment tests.

Abhijit Mukherjee of Shibpur had passed BTech with over 80 per cent marks, graduating in electrical engineering from the Meghnad Saha Institute of Technology off EM Bypass. He got the Infosys job through campus placement in the third semester.

In the third week of February Abhijit left for the company’s Mysore office, where all fresh Infosys recruits from campuses across the country are sent for eight months’ training. Last Tuesday night, he hanged himself in his room at the staff hostel.

His father Ashish Mukherjee, 48, a senior marketing executive with a private firm, said Abhijit was struggling to cope with the pressure of the training schedule.

“He had called me late on Tuesday and spoken to me at length about his fears. He had fared poorly in one of the tests. Many of his friends who had failed had been sacked,” Mukherjee said.

In his six-page suicide note, Abhijit did not blame the company or its training programme but only himself. He wrote he did not feel competent enough to cope with the strain.

“He had sounded frustrated and under pressure (on Tuesday)…. I asked him to just return home since his well-being was our prime concern. He said he would stick it out, but now he has ended his life,” Mukherjee said, tears rolling down his unshaven face.

An Infosys employee who had undergone the training programme told The Telegraph it was the “toughest” he had ever been through.

“It is the best possible training for people just out of college,” the young software engineer said. He admitted, though, that some of his colleagues found the schedule and the regular tests a bit too tough.

Earlier this year, Chandraprabha, a 22-year-old trainee from Jharkhand, had killed herself on the Mysore campus, apparently unable to take the pressure.

Abhijit, a former student of St Xavier’s Collegiate School, was a well-behaved and responsible young man, relatives said. “In the suicide note, he has asked his brother Arijit, a Class VIII student, to take care of his parents,” a family member said while consoling Chandra, 46, Abhijit’s mother.

On Tuesday night, Abhijit had told Chandra to call and wake him up at 5am the next morning so he could start studying early.

When Chandra made the call on Wednesday morning, Abhijit’s phone just kept ringing. After repeatedly calling him for two hours, she rang one of his friends in Mysore. The friend found Abhijit’s room locked from inside.

He informed Abhijit’s parents about this and then approached the staff hostel’s security officer, who opened the lock with a master key to find Abhijit hanging at the end of a rope from a hook in the ceiling. He was declared dead on arrival at a local hospital.

The body was flown to Calcutta after a post-mortem and he was cremated at the Shibpur burning ghat today.

“We are saddened by the unfortunate demise of one of our employees, Abhijit Mukherjee, under tragic circumstances,” an Infosys official said.

“Our sympathies and prayers are with the family of the deceased. Abhijit joined us in February this year and was undergoing training at our Mysore campus. Infosys will provide all necessary support to the family in their hour of grief.”