IITs and the pressure trap: When rank becomes an identity

Last week, a 2nd-year energy science and engineering BTech student at IIT Bombay reportedly committed suicide a few hours after he had been accused by a professor of allegedly using a phone and ChatGPT during a mid-semester exam. He was the third IIT-B student to die this year. An IIT Kanpur alumnus dataset from RTI replies and media reports counts 171 deaths by suicide and unnatural causes across IITs since 2006, 120 of them in the last decade.

The inconvenient truth is that the prestige that IITs hold is the very thing that is the root cause of these tragic deaths. JEE sorts something like 1.5 mn candidates into a few thousand seats. The ranking it produces is a precise, expensive and widely trusted signal of aptitude. That signal is complete the day the student walks into an IIT campus. Nothing that happens over the next 4 yrs really adds to it.

What the degree does add is a second signal - a much weaker one: that the holder managed to persist through a programme. Employers value persistence, sure. But they do not treat it as the point.


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Software firms and consultancies recruit from computer science departments of IITs first, and from the metallurgy department last. Each branch of the IIT tells them how a candidate ranked the day he or she entered the institute. A student who leaves after the first year for a startup or a foreign university carries that rank with him or her, and really 'loses' nothing.

IITs admit students to branches assigned by JEE rank. A group of students selected entirely from the top of the national distribution is arithmetically guaranteed to have half its members below the median for the first time in their lives. Stopping mid-course would be treated as failure, because the IIT brand can't afford dilution of credentials of an admitted student.

Put these factors together and you have a structure where all the value sits at the entrance gate. A person who has passed through this gate and then stops can be perceived to have fallen from a greater height than if he or she had not entered an IIT. This makes for heightened vulnerability.

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Essentially, we have built a tournament where the prize is handed out at the start. Then we spend 4 yrs telling these 'winners' that they might still lose. When students crack under pressure and decide on self-harm, we file these 'cases' under mental health duress. Actually, the die is loaded literally at the start.

Again, unsavoury as it may sound, caste does come into it. For example, dalit students whose families have spoken out were disproportionately handed out a 'public verdict' on their competence - a student on a degree extension, or whose seniors stopped talking to him once they knew his rank.

One solution would be to admit students to IITs and assign branches after a common first year, by preference and competence, so that the branch goes back being a subject rather than merely a rank. It would award a base credential at the end of 2nd year to every student in good standing, and describe the degree as a continuation of it. It would grade against a standard, not the room.

None of this would cost the potential employer a thing, since nothing the employer values would be removed. The rank would still exist, and recruiters would still 'find' it. What it would cost is the belief that the IIT entrance gate is the only thing worth having.