AISA is shocked and angered by the death of Rishikesh Kumar, a second-year MSc Physics student, who died on 22 August after falling from the sixth floor of the Lecture Hall Complex.
We stand with his family and friends in this time of grief and sorrow. This is the second student death at IIT Delhi this year alone, and it is part of a far longer pattern the administration has consistently failed to confront. We have learned that Rishikesh had been denied a major research project, and was forced to drop a semester. The administration’s script is by now familiar: reduce every death to individual mental illness, issue a condolence email, and move on while the structural conditions that produce this suffering go unexamined. Denial of academic opportunity, punitive semester drops, unaccountable faculty discretion, and an inadequate, stigmatized counselling system are not incidental to these deaths they are causes. The Telegraph recently reported that during Modi’s visit to the convocation, the administration had ordered students to bow at a 360-degree angle in order to receive their degrees. The article was later forcibly taken down from the news portal.
We demand: an independent inquiry into this death and the pattern of suicides at IIT Delhi; full transparency on counselling infrastructure and its actual accessibility to students; a review of the discretionary power supervisors hold over students’ academic futures; and an end to the administration’s practice of shielding itself from media scrutiny and accountability.
