At least 53 students died across the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) between 2020-21 and 2024-25, with more than half of these deaths involving students from Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST) and Other Backward Classes (OBC), according to official data accessed by HT.
The figures – which include 45 suicides and eight unnatural deaths – are in line with student intake from these marginalised groups in the government-owned institutions. Nilesh Chandra Srivastava, under secretary in the department of higher education (DoHE), wrote to IITs on December 1, 2025 seeking information in response to a provisionally admitted Lok Sabha Starred Question (Diary No, according to correspondence seen by HT. 3682) scheduled for December 8, 2025. Congress MP KC Venugopal had asked the questions on December 8 last year related to student suicides in IITs and other central educational institutions. IITs reported five student deaths in 2020-21, six each in 2021-22 and 2022-23, followed by 17 in 2023-24 and 19 in 2024-25, according to the data. Suicides accounted for 84.9% of all deaths. The number of unnatural deaths also rose in the latest year, with six of the 19 deaths reported in 2024-25 falling in that category.
the data was not tabled in Parliament Although the ministry received the responses from IITs. The figures, based on the IITs’ own submissions to the ministry, reveal a sustained increase in student deaths across the country’s premier engineering institutions.
Earlier, the Union education ministry in July 2023 informed Parliament that 39 students died by suicide in the five years between 2018 and 2023 across IITs.
The number of deaths could be higher, according to an independent assessment.
