Can we turn a ‘killing machine’ into a caring one? Inside the silence after an IISER-Pune student’s death

Another day, another institutional death

In the wake of the recent death of the Black professor Jason Arday from University of Cambridge, who committed suicide after being racially hunted for years, India steps into its 81st year of independence with yet another student death. The students of one of the leading premier education and research institutes in India, IISER-Pune, are currently in a state of shock after the demise of a 3rd year BS-MS female student in the campus on 16th August 2026 around midnight. According to a student (who preferred anonymity), about this unfortunate incident, possibly a suicide by jumping off of the upper floors of the Bajaj Women’s Hostel, the institute has stated that the police investigation is underway and that they will provide full support in the process. The entire community inside the campus is extending help and support to the family, roommates and close friends of the deceased. The institute’s mental health counseling professionals have been making efforts to provide support. In light of the incident, all classes were suspended for a day on 17th August, and the institutional club events were suspended for a few days. A condolence meeting was also held at the institute’s auditorium at 5pm on the 17th, in the presence of the Director, which lasted 3 minutes. The Director, in his brief address, requested students to seek help from mental health counselors, faculties and staff for coping up with the grief and distress. He assured, 'You are not alone', and acknowledged that the students have a lot of questions in their mind— as per one of the students present in that gathering. However, it was not enough to address the severe depth of a series of such incidents across premier campuses in the country.

The Ensuing Agitation

According to the students who shared the internal details with me, the first responders included many nearby students with some accompanying the victim to the AIMS-Pune hospital. The campus medical professional Dr. Anil Kumar Madhurapantula and one of the security team supervisors were also in that team. The victim was subsequently declared deceased in the hospital. The administrative staff visited the site afterward. Student Council members were actively involved in coordinating with the staff and first responders to address the situation both at the hospital and inside the campus.

The first sign of agitation came from the general students who gathered within hours of the incident’s occurrence. They were dissatisfied with the handling of the situation by the staff. The lack of enough student council members in the current posts also made it difficult for the authority to have a sensible dialogue with the student crowd gathered on spot. The students literally took the suo moto charge of critically analysing the incident and speaking up to the lack of intent shown from the institute’s part. Students kept demanding a transparent, accountable, and prompt list of proper steps to be taken by the authority. Some of the agitating students started recording the conversations on mobile cameras. Another huge crowd of students gathered outside the hostel to hold the Dean of Student Affairs (Dean SA) accountable regarding the steps followed by the authority immediately after the said incident. The agitated crowd remained in place till the morning of 17th, with back and forth unresolved conversations between the students and the administration.

Students’ demands

As shared by the anonymous students, the main concerns highlighted by the agitated and grieving mass included the following:

Lack of adequate training for the security staff. According to some students, there was a serious lack of preparedness among the security staff for handling the situation until the higher-ups arrived onsite. To identify the victim in a haste, the security head apparently was showing a photo of the victim’s mutilated and blood drenched body to the students around, which resulted in serious trauma, panic, and helplessness. Demand was also heard of ensuring a designated protocol in place for every office position to enact if a situation like this arises. Students’ mobile camera recordings show people in administration admitting that there might be a lack of communication between the staff members designated to handle situations like this, and that it might be the result of not having any hard and fast protocol regarding this.

Faculty apathy.

Students also admitted later that they were extremely saddened by the limited concern shown by far from the larger faculty community, despite being housed inside the campus. According to them, the presence of more faculty members could have helped the Dean SA, Hostel Committee (HC), Registrar, Assistant Dean of Student and Campus Activities, and other officials present both in campus and hospital in coordinating better between the two sites. Some of these questions were also addressed by the Dean SA Prof. Chandrasheel Bhagwat, HC member Dr. Sushmita Adhikari, Prof. Umakant D. Rapol, Dean Academics Prof. Srabanti Choudhury, Associate Dean of Student and Campus Activities Dr. Anirban Hazra, and the security supervisor Mr. Waghmare, on site.

Owing to the severity and prompt requirement of officials to coordinate with the medical and legal team, the Dean SA assured students that a Town Hall meeting be arranged in some time for the student community to express their concerns to the administration. The students demanded the meeting to happen as soon as possible, which unfortunately is still pending as of today. The mourning in the institute prevails, questions remain, and students await answers from the administration. The student community in IISER-Pune is greatly affected by this incident and have concerns over facilities provided by the institution to safeguard students’ lives in emergency situations.

Not a standalone incident, rather a systemic failure

This has again made us, the students and scholars’ community of India, deeply think about the nature of the incident itself. There will be enough push from the institute and the larger society alike, for considering such incidents as fringe personal stories of particular individuals, reduced to unfortunate fallouts of personal individual problems. We dare to claim, with our hearts and minds, that it is time, if not too late, for fundamentally changing the way we ought to look at such incidents. Over the past five years, India’s premier institutes like the IITs, the IISC, and the IISERs have recorded more than 100 student suicides on campus. Very recently, we saw cases at IIT Kharagpur and just two days ago at IIT D, both brazenly similar to the IISER-Pune incident. No sane person can look away from the gravely concerning emerging pattern out of such incidents with an uncanny similarity, happening endlessly on such a massive scale, inside institutions of a similar stature. It is only logically as well as humanely obvious that we dare to ask whether students are at their fault for killing themselves, or, they are being structurally and institutionally subjected to immense mental and societal pressure resulting in an inescapable choice of killing oneself. Being the primary stakeholders, it is upon us to acknowledge the reality that our research and educational institutes are turning into killing machines. It is also upon us to reclaim these spaces, repair them into caring ones.

Let us check out some prominent issues that direct to faults and designs in the structure itself. These lurking ones were shared with me by another IISER PhD scholar who preferred their anonymity.

Curricular mismatch. Students at IISERs have been facing a serious mismatch in curriculum for a long time, between the IAT (IISER Entrance Test) and the immediate first year BS-MS curriculum. Students are selected as admissible to the BS-MS programme on the basis of their knowledge in three core subject-areas of natural sciences, only to be subjected to a much wider arena of high-stake assessments within a year, requiring expertise in a lot more subjects and subject area knowledge. On top of it, constantly living under an immense meritocratic atmosphere leads to harming rather than nurturing naturally inquisitive minds. A significant portion of the student populace inside the IISER-like systems spend their daily lives standing on a thread, with familial, social, and institutional shame haunting them from behind. Taking the life of oneself rather becomes the only path for respite. That these are structurally common malices and not fringe incidents of individuals at fault is evident from concerns that are commonly shared within the IISER-IIT-IISc network across the country.

Other than addressing such a fundamental issue, with students’ lives at serious stake, the authorities in premier institutes like IITs-IISc-IISERs have always pushed back with more meritocratic logic, deficiently framing students. Addressing and preventing student suicides, for institutes like IITs-IISc-IISERs, more than often mean using utterly bizarre and inhuman means like installing hundreds of CCTV cameras in the campus and hostel corridors, installing wall-mounted ceiling fans to discourage students from hanging themselves up, or, putting up nets around the hostels so that the students do not jump off of the upper floors to kill themselves. Institutes like IISERs-IITs-IISc take pride in inculcating scientific minds and making future scientists, but are never able to show a single shred of scientific evidence regarding the number of CCTV cameras negatively correlating with the number of suicides in the campus.

Mess food.

Many IITs and IISERs also have serious problems with the quality of their mess food. Despite calling themselves premier scientific research and education hub, with scientifically documented evidence of food insecurity leading to stalled academic growth in college goers, these institutes fail in maintaining quality food supply for their own students. Other than addressing this long-standing issue, we see in IISER-like canteens singular catering agencies winning tenders year after year. Let us remind our readers that it is the professors and administrators with degrees from Oxford and Harvard who have been the decision-makers running these systems. Thus we cannot but land at critically questioning the logic of meritocracy here (what with a Harvard degree if you end up only putting up nets in the hostel corridors to prevent suicides by jumping off).

Holidays and recuperations. Usually, PhD students at such institutions are supposed to get 30 holidays a year, but PhD scholars only get two weeks in some labs. It is an open secret that a professor from one of these premier institutes installed CCTV cameras in their lab just to surveil and make sure the students work late into the night. Disasters are bound to happen when an endless list of sleepless nights is cocktailed with immense performance pressure, and a constant institutional meritocratic gaze. Not only this, when students wanted their own spaces and ways of sharing, mutually aiding and caring for peers, earlier this month IISER-Pune responded with a blanket restriction on movements between hostels for male and female students. Internal agitation is ongoing on that issue too.

Discriminations

Apart from peer pressure and lack of institutional care, there are larger structural and societal factors that add into the precariousness. Caste, class, gender, and religious differences remain major arbitrators of a student’s life inside the campus. When read against the backdrop of Dalit students’ increasing number of suicides in premier educational institutes across India, we get to just have a glimpse of a cruel killing machine in disguise of an educational one. We indeed get reminded of two of the greatest global education philosophers Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich both of whom warned us almost 70 years ago that education systems in capitalist and otherwise extractive societies are designed to alienate human beings from their natural pursuit of knowledge and labour, thereby turning them into shallow mechanical dolls. Once that process is complete without any active resistance, humans are not far from becoming Homo Sacer, a bare state of living in the modern societies where being killed with impunity is not an exception anymore, rather a rule for the sake of sovereignty. As philosopher Giorgio Agamben argued, cities in the modern sovereign states are nothing less than concentration camps for certain groups of discriminated and marginalized people, for whom a state of exception is perpetually objectified as a normal state. With burgeoning divisiveness in the educational spaces, inside such cities, as machineries of the neo-liberal states, paired with always-already rooted justification of ‘lack of merit’, we fear that utterances like 'Oh (s)he just could not handle the pressure' after each student-suicide will become more common than not. We fear lest the educational spaces become concentration camps of our neo-liberal age.

Even though the August 16 incident is still under investigation, it is safe to say that we may never be able to pinpoint the exact trigger for the death of that IISER-Pune student. What we can and must do immediately however, is to ponder over the possibilities for a better humane and caring educational space in IISc-IITs-IISERs. Of course there are larger structures like Brahminical hegemony of scientific knowledge and the neo-liberal consumption-based extractive economy, both of which fuel the meritocratic, competitive, production-based logic inside premier institutes like IISc-IITs-IISERs. We as students and scholars may not have the capacity and headspace to work towards changing those structures right away. However, we can, and must, call for an administration which listens to our demands without infantilizing us. We can and must expect to have more caring faculty. We can and must expect an educational space where scientific learning can only be for the sheer love of the subject itself, if we want so.