Kalyani, May 3: The Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Kalyani today said it "proposes to examine if there was any deficiency" in its student management system to ensure that cases like this week's suicide by a disadvantaged 19-year-old don't recur.

The resolve came a day after Sagar Mandal's death turned the focus on how higher education institutes in India dealt with stress possibly linked to attitudes towards those coming from less privileged backgrounds.

The boy from Majherpara village in Haringhata was found hanging in a bathroom at the IISER on Monday, the day the second-year student was to write an exam on earth sciences.

An officer at Haringhata police station said the post-mortem report that came in today mentioned asphyxia caused by hanging as the reason for the teen's death. "There was no internal or external injury mark on the body, except a ligature around the neck," the officer added.

The fact-finding team that the institute in Kalyani, 50km from Calcutta, had formed to probe the death called it a suicide, based on the post-mortem report. But the committee, institute sources said, would widen its focus.

"We maintain the highest standard of sincerity while taking care of students. Nevertheless, the committee proposes to examine if there was any deficiency in our existing infrastructure to deal with and reach out to students," said Arindam Kundagrami, the dean of student affairs who is on the three-member panel.

An official said one of the objectives of the panel would be to develop "an institutional mechanism that could ensure some students don't feel alienated" in a competitive academic atmosphere, adding that a communication gap in the existing mechanism may have led to the tragedy.

The institute's director, R.N. Mukherjee, had yesterday said the institute had a proper counselling unit. But several teachers and students had earlier accused the institute of dismantling the mechanism by withdrawing facilities like the mentorship programme and a counselling unit.

Registrar Joydeep Sil said the IISER, an institute of national importance and a coveted campus in Bengal, would make "more efforts to understand students".

"Henceforth we will make more efforts to understand their issues so that even the problems of a student who is an introvert could be understood," Sil said.

Sagar's fellow students said the boy had largely kept to himself.

A consulting psychiatrist of the IISER this newspaper spoke to said students coming from a poor economic background often tend to be introverts when they make it to a big institution where students come from various sections of the society. "They suffer from a complex. That is when they need support from a student management system," said the psychiatrist who is attached to a government hospital.

At institutes like IISC Bangalore and IIT Kharagpur, the authorities focus on the institutional mechanism to deal with stress-related issues.

An IIT Kharagpur official said the tech school has a clinic with clinical psychologists, general psychologists, psychiatrists and counsellors to help students deal with stress. IISC Bangalore has a similar mechanism.

Some students suggested that Sagar, the first boy from his village to have made it to an institute of national importance, was anxious that he might miss out on the stipend he got from the HRD ministry if he under-performed in exams.

Sagar used to send a part of the stipend - Rs 60,000 a year - to his family every month.

Police today visited the campus but did not question any of the accused named in the FIR Sagar's family had lodged.

Sagar's father Susanta Mandal, a mason who barely makes Rs 2,000 a month, had alleged that three students who were in the same year as his son used to mock him because he came from a Scheduled Caste background and was weak in English.

"No one from the IISER wanted to know how my son was often abused for his caste and for the scholarship money he shared with us," Susanta said.