A third-year IIT Kharagpur student who jumped from the seventh-floor terrace of a hostel on April 18 was facing “academic issues” while simultaneously preparing for the CFA (chartered financial analyst) examinations, according to a report by a fact-finding committee.

The report, presented during an open house with students last week, says the student was finding it “difficult” to handle the additional pressure.

The open house was held to discuss ways to stop the recurrence of deaths on the campus. As many as eight students have been found dead over the past 15 months.

According to the report, the third-year student in the dual degree programme also spoke to his friends about his apprehensions about not getting an internship through the IIT’s career development centre, as his CGPA (Cumulative Grade Point Average) was below 8.

Jayveersinh Dodiya, from Gujarat, expressed his “concerns” about his performance in the end-semester exams, according to the report.

The 10-member committee spoke to residents of Nehru Hall and officials of Atal Bihari Vajpayee Hall, from whose terrace the student had jumped.

Early on April 19, Dodiya, a resident of Nehru Hall, went to the Atal Bihari Vajpayee Hall of Residence, about 2km from his hostel, climbed to the terrace and jumped.

The committee has recommended that the institute consider installing grilles on all accessible balconies in high-rise campus buildings to ensure “enhanced security”.

One of the recommendations states that the institute’s security wing and hall management centre should secure hostel rooftops in accordance with safety norms.

The committee is also probing the death of a fourth-year student who was
found hanging in his hostel room on April 28. The findings of this probe have yet to come out.

A fourth-year student of the electronics and electrical communication engineering department was found dead at IIT Kharagpur on the morning of April 28.

Soham Halder, 21, from Barasat, was found hanging from the ceiling fan of his room at the Madan Mohan Malviya Hall of Residence.

The recurrence of student deaths — two in 10 days and eight since January 2025 — has raised questions about the institute’s ability to handle students’ stress.

The report, which Metro has read, suggests Dodiya was encountering pressure on multiple fronts.

During the open house IIT director Suman Chakraborty said that the institute would provide internships with stipends to those who fail to obtain opportunities outside the campus to ease the pressure on students.

The report states that it was not “mandatory” for a dual-degree programme student to pursue an internship. Yet, Dodiya was worried.

However, the report also says the student did not have any visible signs of depression and behaved normally till late on April 17.

The IIT director flagged systemic gaps and said that vulnerable students who did not walk up to counselling centres remained “invisible” to the IIT administration.

He also said that distress signals across systems — wardens, faculty, mess staff — do not reach the administration quickly enough.

The IIT director told Metro on Saturday: “If a student does not visit a counselling facility, it really becomes a challenge for the IIT administration to track down a case, considering that the campus has over 16,000 students. Still, we have to keep trying to detect vulnerable students.”

The director said family members must also instil confidence in students so that they do not take failures to heart.

“They must tell their sons and daughters that by studying in an IIT, they have already proved their worth and should not be devastated by setbacks,” he said.

Academic setbacks, particularly CGPA drops, family expectations and lack of parental awareness about mental health were cited as major psychological stress triggers among students by IIT counsellors.

The counsellors also said parental expectations around academic performance often “conflicted with the student’s lived experience of stress and isolation”.

Director Chakraborty said he would discuss the recommendation to install grilles on balconies with the concerned authorities.

In its report, the committee has also recommended installing more CCTV cameras in the hostels.