Mumbai, Aug. 11: A PhD student was found hanging in his hostel room at IIT Powai today, months after the institute took special measures to prevent campus suicides.

Kanpur boy Balkrishna Gupta, 27, left behind a note for his mother saying he was ending his life because of personal reasons, but did not explain what they were.

The young man was last seen around 9pm yesterday after the convocation programme where the chief guest, steel magnate L.N. Mittal, had spoken on the virtues of fortitude.

When the doors of room 129 in hostel number 12 would not open till late this afternoon, worried students called police. Around 3pm, they entered the room and found Gupta hanging from the fan.

The suicide is the second on the IIT Powai campus in the past eight months.

On December 31 last year, a 21-year-old student from Hyderabad, Mallepula Shrikant, had hanged himself in his hostel room, blaming exam pressure in his suicide note.

Shaken institute authorities had then conducted a panel discussion on how to prevent suicides and decided to take steps to deter reclusive behaviour among students and encourage inter-personal relations on the campus.

In March, the institute restricted Internet access at the hostels, where its 5,100 students stay, between 11 at night and 12.30 the next afternoon. This was meant to ensure the students did not spend the nights surfing the web, a practice seen as the prime reason for declining interaction among them.

Shrikant, a final-year student of electrical engineering, however, had cited his inability to clear “a backlog of exams” in his suicide note as the reason for ending his life.

IIT officials, including P. Gopalan, the faculty member in charge of student affairs, were unavailable for comment.

Gupta’s family has been informed and the body sent for post-mortem, the police said.