Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone became a bestseller and revealed intriguing aspects of the IITs, India’s premier engineering institutes. And after the suicide of IIT Kanpur student J. Bharadwaja last month, the golden dust surrounding the IITs is taking a beating.

The fact that Bharadwaja’s death, is the fourth such suicide at IIT Kanpur in less than two years, is cause for worry. Bharadwaja, a third year civil engineering student, committed suicide on April 26, 2007, by jumping in front of a rushing train.

Bharadwaja has been described as an average student by both the head of the department of civil engineering, C.V.R. Murthy and the director of IIT Kanpur, S.G. Dhande. “He had failed twice and had approached the students counselling cell for advice,” says Dhande. According to Dhande, Bharadwaja had said that counselling had helped him a lot and that he was looking forward to a better performance next semester. As it turned out, counselling didn’t work and Bharadwaja paid for his academic failure by taking his life.

The question that needs to be asked is whether the strain of studying at the IITs is really worth it. “There are issues that need to be considered, beginning with the process of entry into IITs,” says Dr Rima Mukherji, a Calcutta-based consultant psychiatrist. She says that many average students who have gone through the grind of tuitions, like the ones offered in Kota, Rajasthan, to gain entry into the IITs find themselves at sea in an ambience where they are at the bottom of the ladder.

Good students who would never envisage themselves as anything but the best based on their consistent academic school record, find it difficult to reconcile with the fact that they can fail or receive F grades, especially at IIT Kanpur, where grades are publicly displayed. “The public humiliation for a student who’s done badly is intense in such a situation,” says Dr Aniruddha Deb, another city-based psychiatrist.

To avoid such stress, IIT Kanpur is now doing away with the practice of displaying the F Grade on the notice board. There are other measures that are also being mulled. The academic programme at IIT Kanpur is under review and the grading system is being modified. “We conduct Art of Living classes and are organising meetings with parents to help students cope with the stress,” says Dhande. “We are sending a batch of students this month to meet the President of India so that they can learn about life beyond studies,” he adds.

IIT Kanpur also hosted a workshop recently on preventing suicides, with experts from India and US discussing the issue. “There are several measures in place and we are strengthening the existing measures,” says Kripa Shankar, deputy director of IIT Kanpur.

Other institutes are also taking note. For example, IIT Kharagpur is considering setting up a counselling cell. Says H.K. Tiwari, dean of students affairs at IIT Kharagpur, “We have a hospital within the premises and invite students’ relatives to come over in case of serious illness to give them company.”

However, all said and done, doubts linger on how the IITs or indeed any academic centre of excellence in India functions as far as dealing with stress is concerned.