27 September,2026 07:33 AM IST | Mumbai | Tanisha Banerjee
Pic/iStock
Inside IIT-Bombay, where students arrive after years of competing for a place among the country's brightest, an examination has changed the conversation about student life. On September 18, second-year BTech student Sahil Wakode was allegedly caught using his phone during a mid-semester examination. The institute maintained that no disciplinary action had been initiated against him. Hours later, Wakode died by suicide in his hostel room. IITB later retracted its statement, saying it was inappropriate to characterise the circumstances of Wakode's death while the investigation was open.
What followed was chaos. Students took to the campus in protest, questioning the institute's handling of the incident, its communication after Wakode's death, and the pressures of life at IIT-Bombay. The protesters clarified that they did not support academic misconduct, but wanted an investigation into greater institutional accountability.
Wakode's parents alleged that their son had faced caste-based harassment for three months, leading to an FIR under the SC/ST Act. IIT-Bombay denied the allegations. Some students, meanwhile, have also rejected the caste discrimination claim. Professor Suryanarayana Doolla, who was named by the family, was subsequently removed from his deanship amid the investigation.
But the life of an IIT student is a complicated one. After spending years as the smartest in the room, arriving at a campus filled with toppers can mean constantly fighting for a place. Then come the mental pressures from family, of identity including caste, relationships with professors, and finding the best placement. The question now remains - what is going on inside the campuses of these dream colleges?
Karan Walia [name changed] remembers the evening through the sound of an ambulance. It was around 7 pm, and at IIT-Bombay, an ambulance outside one of the hostels "is very normal at a residential college", says the third-year student. It was only later that he learnt a student had died by suicide.
Walia had spoken to Sahil Wakode a few times at the badminton court. He remembers him as someone who was social and active - the sort of person whose death did not seem possible from the outside.
"Speaking to the HOD, I came to know that Wakode was counselled that no strict action will be taken against him. In most cases of cheating, professors do show mercy and give them a second chance," Walia says.
He dismisses allegations against Professor Doolla on grounds of harassment. "I have spent a year under him. Professor Doolla was very supportive and protective of the students. It's a very wrong narrative being set outside that the faculty is against students. And I don't blame the parents here because they were emotionally driven from these protests."
Walia points out that political outfits such as Student Federation of India (SFI) and All India Students' Federation (AISF) are trained to use such incidents in their political favour. He also speaks candidly about the academic pressures he believes students face at IIT. "If I, from General category, score 200 marks for this branch, for someone from SC/ST category if they score even 50 per cent of that, they will get the same branch. Now when these people come to IIT, how can they compete with us since they have been scoring half the marks?" he says. He adds that he does not know whether this contributed to Wakode's death, saying, "This could be a reason for him to take this step as well."
Walia claims students had previously told him that Wakode had been caught cheating in exams twice during his first year, though he says he cannot independently verify those accounts. But he is uncomfortable with how Wakode is being spoken about after his death. "The way people are talking about him is as if he did something bad to someone else. Even when he is dead, he is not being allowed to rest."
The debate around caste and reservation emerges again as many believe that the SC/ST Act has been misused. Some believe Wakode should never have gotten reservation since he owned an iPhone, confusing reservation to a poverty-elevation program. Ravi [name changed], a fifth-year Computer Science student at IIT Kharagpur, argues what reservation is meant to address. "Reservation is needed for a reason," says Ravi, who is Dalit and grew up in Jaipur. His own JEE Advanced ranks illustrate the gap in representation, he says, "My general rank was 6000, where my category rank was 140. You see, out of 6000 students, only 140 students from the Dalit community are in there."
Getting to IIT meant access to resources he could not have otherwise. "I didn't have a laptop. But now with labs I can learn coding and computing," he says. He is the first person in his family to study mathematics at this level and describes himself as a "first-generation learner". Back home, he says, caste still shapes everyday life. "Even from my community, they are not allowed to go into temples," he says. At village programmes, "we have separate spaces to eat".
In India, five out of six multidimensionally poor people are from lower tribes or castes. This is in the 2021 report on poverty by the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI). The Scheduled Tribe (ST) group accounts for 9.4 per cent of the population and is the poorest, with 65 million of the 129 million people living in multidimensional poverty. Then comes the Scheduled Caste (SC) group with 33.3 per cent (94 million of 283 million people) and 27.2 per cent of the Other Backward Class (OBC) group (160 million of 588 million people) who live in multidimensional poverty.
For another engineering graduate, from Government College of Engineering, Amravati, caste-based comments was something he had been conditioned to. Coming from a financially struggling family, he grew up watching his father, a painter, face subtle discrimination. "When he would go for jobs, some would try to figure out his caste by asking for his last name and then avoid him later on. These things are common. So there was a lot of pressure on me to take my family out of this situation," he says.
College brought a different version of this. "Casual casteism toh chalta hai," he says, "I made it a point to score high so that nobody would get a chance to comment on my quota." In his class of 80, around 10-12 students had entered through reservation, he recalls, adding that many would still rank among the top 20. "You can say that I had to perform better and work harder for my marks as compared to those from the General category."
Pointing to pressure in colleges he says, "Professors have a lot of power and sometimes they openly threaten someone they don't like by saying, âI will ruin your academic year.'" He recalls a student suicide at his college that, he says, received little attention. "It was on local news for a day but the college swept it under the rug. Nothing happened after that, which is concerning."
. âWakode's was the third suicide on the IIT-Bombay campus this year.
. âNaman Agarwal: The 21-year-old BTech student died on February 4, leaving behind a handwritten suicide note in his room. The police revealed that he was undergoing treatment for depression.
. âSohil Rajkumar Sangwan: A 20-year-old, a second-year BTech student in Materials Science and Engineering, was found dead in his hostel room on July 28. He left no note, but the police did recover handwritten poems and writings on depression.
A friend of Sahil Wakode at IITB explains how family pressure for the best placement, and competition are one of the major stressors in college
A friend of Wakode and a fourth-year IIT-Bombay student says, "If you want to know why it's tough to be a student at IITB, I will answer." There are, he believes, "1500 of the smartest minds in one year" competing in the same space. "Keep them in one place and ask them to compete together, no wonder there will be stress."
Much of it is peer-induced. "Everyone at IITB is doing 100 different things at once. You will always feel the need to do better or get one-up," he says. The pressure, he adds, has increasingly moved beyond academics. Placements are "one of the most real" sources of anxiety. "Students want the best job on day one. People who have always been toppers also have egos." With companies increasingly shifting towards internships and pre-placement offers, he says, that pressure is now reaching younger batches.
Family expectations can add another layer. "Families look at certain four-crore packages in the news and want you to do the same," he says, though such packages involve only "one or two students out of 1500".
Ironically, he finds the coursework itself comparatively manageable, "If you can crack JEE, you can do well here. The problem is that people stop studying once they come here."
According to the preliminary findings of the Mumbai Police Crime Branch, CCTV cameras recorded Wakode's movements inside the examination hall between 12.30 pm and 12.45 pm on September 18. Police said that with about 15 minutes remaining for the examination, Wakode was seen bending down to look at something in his pocket. Professor Doolla then questioned him and took him aside, away from the other students, according to the Crime Branch.
Political analyst Dibakar Dutta believes that the SC/ST Act has been misused in Sahil Wakode's suicide case, alleging loopholes in the narrative
The debate around Sahil Wakode's death has also spilled into the political space, with political analyst and OpIndia assistant editor Dibakar Dutta publicly defending Professor Doolla. In an Instagram post, Dutta wrote, "I stand with Professor Suryanarayan Doolla. I will not be a mute spectator to the brazen weaponisation of the âSC/ST Act' to settle scores with a professor who caught a student cheating in an exam."
Dutta's argument centres on the timing of the allegations. "Until the day of Wakode's death, there was no complaint of any caste-based discrimination against Professor Doolla either with the SC/ST cell of the institute or the administration," he says.
He questions the family's account of alleged harassment over three months. "Where and how did Sahil communicate this information to his father? Is this revelation in the form of written text or WhatsApp message or an unrecorded phone call which we can't verify because Sahil is not in this mortal world?"
He also asks why, if the family was aware of the alleged harassment, no complaint was made earlier. "Why did Sahil's parents not lodge a complaint with IIT-Bombay or the police and instead chose to let their son suffer for three months?"
"It has made me realise how easy it is to weaponise a law which was originally intended to help the SC/ST community."
IIT-Bombay had issued guidelines in July 2023 after one student, Darshan Solanki, died by suicide which was reiterated by Professor Suryanarayana Doolla - the then Dean of Student Affairs - in 2024. The email says, "It is equally inappropriate for any person (students/staff/faculty members) to ask other students about their JEE (Advanced) ranks/GATE scores, or any other information that may reveal the caste or other related aspects. While the person asking the question may feel it is innocent, and it may be driven purely by curiosity, asking the question can often have an adverse impact on the other student."
According to data IITs shared with the Department of Higher Education in December 2025, 54 per cent of the students who died by suicide between 2021 and 2024-25, came from SC, ST, OBC groups. Across the country, the National Crime Records Bureau has reported 1.23 lakh student suicides between 2014 and 2024. In the USA, suicide is now the second leading cause of death for people aged 10-24 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Marginalised communities from the same age group are seeing an increase, like Black youth suicide increasing by 78 per cent.
[popcorn number="1.23 L" desc="Student suicides between 2014 and 2024 in India" class="Default"]
[popcorn number="78%" desc="Increase in Black youth student suicides in the USA, which sees suicide as the second leading cause of death in ages 10-24" class="Default"]
Anti-caste activist Harsh Singh points to the systematic bias against marginalised communities among professors and masses at large
For anti-caste activist and advocate Harsh Singh, the reaction to Sahil Wakode's death reflects a larger ignorance about what reservation means and how caste operates beyond questions of money.
A Dalit from Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, Singh speaks in support of Wakode's parents.
"This is the history of IIT-Bombay," he says, referring to the 2023 death of Dalit student Darshan Solanki, "Whenever something caste-based takes place, they try to undermine and deny it. This is a pattern with the institute. Nobody is speaking in favour of Wakode. The faculty is taking a rally in support of just Professor Doolla. So the bias is already there."
"It's such an ignorant thing to think that the reservation programme is a poverty elevation one," he says, "You are humiliated by faculty and students on caste-based issues whether you have an iPhone or not." He argues that reservation is about representation, not just poverty.
"They are bothered by the mere presence of someone from a marginalised background. Professors are not counselled on how to speak to someone from Dalit background. If a student is using reservation, they want him to look poor and be poor. If he dresses well and has money then people cannot accept that."
He rejects statements made by IIT-Bombay and the newly surfaced email by Professor Doolla from 2024 which spreads awareness on discrimination. "Anybody can deduce someone's caste from one's surname. So it is not possible to outrightly say that nobody knows the caste of someone by just not asking their JEE rank. Why then is it so, that most suicide cases are of marginalised communities?"
The institute has also apologised for an earlier statement linking Wakode to the use of ChatGPT during the examination.
The question of how professors speak to students is not new. IIT Delhi director Rangan Banerjee stressed in 2024 the need for an inclusive environment that recognises the different pressures students bring with them.
In an opinion piece on September 21, IIT faculty member Jaison Manjaly argued that faculty and student-affairs teams need training to "recognise distress", understand bias, protect confidentiality, and respond without humiliating students. A disciplinary encounter, he wrote, should begin with a "humane conversation" and explain the support available to the student.
The idea is to recognise that at an institution where students arrive carrying different social backgrounds and expectations, the person on the other side of the desk may need more than a rulebook.
Dr Paras Sharma, a psychologist who has worked with college students, says that a lot of parents don't know the pressure they put on their children
"I don't think that the sources of stress begin at the big institutions," says doctor Paras Sharma, a psychologist who has worked with college students, including at IIT-Bombay and VNIT Nagpur for over a decade now. "The sources of the stresses are there right from when one is preparing to enter into these big institutions. Stress is already there because you are already expecting that you should be able to crack these exams."
"So many of the parents have mortgaged everything to send their children to just coaching. You imagine the kind of pressure that the child has. If something goes wrong, or if you realise that you have fallen out with any of the authorities at the institution, that's it. Your life is ruined."
On top of all of these stressors, comes the all-powerful weight of parental pressure. "I think parental pressure is one of the biggest things, but I don't think that a lot of the parents themselves know what it looks like to be in that system. Even in the recent case, the father has come out and said that Wakode was complaining of harassment for three months. He told his son to bear it for two, three more years, and life will be set. Parents are not perfect. Many of them don't know about lucrative careers outside of medicine and engineering. Which worsens the pressure because parents think that those are the two most lucrative options."
Sharma does not think the case will prompt any substantial change. "I am very sad to say, but this is probably what is going to happen again," he says, "They're just going to appoint a bunch of counsellors on contractual posts or they're going to bring in a private provider on a contractual basis and they are going to wait for this to blow over and that's about it."
Inputs by MT Rizvi
Dr ORS Rao, an IIT alumnus, states that the drop in placements is partly due to AI impacting technical IT job recruitments
Dr ORS Rao, Chancellor of ICFAI University, Sikkim and an IIT-Madras graduate, explains how the changing placement landscape is also changing what an IIT degree can guarantee. His paper, Are Placements Dropping?, looks at how AI and shifting industry requirements are affecting recruitment.
"With AI now affecting IT jobs and technical jobs, expectations of recruiting companies are changing," he says, pointing out that the impact is being felt by Indian as well as international companies. "The average salaries of the toppers are going up, but the problem is when you go to the mid-level students. Those jobs are going down and salaries are not coming up." For students entering the placement race, depth in one technical skill may no longer be enough. Students need capabilities AI cannot easily replicate, like business acumen.
His paper argues that India must also move beyond its traditional IT services model, towards sectors such as electronics, MedTech, SpaceTech, and DefenceTech. It cites placement rates at top campuses such as IIT-Bombay and IIT Delhi falling from historical highs of 85-90 per cent to roughly 70-75 per cent. "The brand IIT alone does not work anymore," Rao says.
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