3 of 23 IITs audited so far
Aarunya has completed deep case-level audits at three of India's 23 IITs — Delhi, Madras and Kanpur. Across those three audits, Aarunya records 29 cases classified in its audits as suicide or suspected suicide. That is not a national IIT total, and not the true total even for those three: it is a floor, reflecting only what could be independently verified. The remaining 20 IITs have not been examined, and we publish no figure for them — not even zero.
IIT Student Deaths: The Numbers Must Be Verifiable
Students are dying across India's IITs, and the public record does not provide a single verifiable count. Before anything else, the limits of this page. Three of 23 IITs audited: 9 cases at Delhi, 11 at Madras, 9 at Kanpur. One of the Delhi nine is provisional — a postgraduate student who died in August 2026, with no institute statement and no police classification at the time of the audit, which our own Delhi report says must be re-checked before publication. That re-check is not documented. Our cross-institute table counts 9 for Delhi; the Delhi report's own certification block counts 8, excluding that case. We publish 9 and name the difference rather than resolving it quietly. Nothing here is a confirmed suicide finding, and nothing here should be added into a national figure. Several figures circulate. Ministerial answers to Parliament give all-IIT totals for various periods. RTI replies give institute-level counts on academic years. An independent compilation gives a much larger cumulative figure, built partly from RTI responses covering fewer than half the IITs. These are not competing counts of one thing — they cover different years, different institutions, and different definitions of who counts as a student. Added together they produce a number that means nothing, and no member of the public can reconcile them. In January 2026 the Supreme Court moved this forward significantly. Exercising its powers under Article 142, it required suicide data for ages 15–29 to be centrally maintained; required the National Crime Records Bureau to distinguish school students from higher-education students; required every institution to report any student suicide or unnatural death to the police as soon as it learns of it, wherever the death occurred and whatever mode the student was studying in; and required an annual report of those deaths to the University Grants Commission and the professional regulators — or, for Central Universities and Institutes of National Importance such as the IITs, to the Department of Higher Education. That machinery is now binding. But nothing in those directions requires any of it to reach the public. The reports go to a regulator or a ministry, not to citizens. There is no shared definition of "student", no shared vocabulary for classifying a death, no case identifier that lets one record be followed from an institute to a ministry to a national total, no obligation for those totals to agree, no history when a figure changes, and no independent audit of any of it. We know what that gap costs, because we measured it. We audited three IITs — Delhi, Madras and Kanpur — building each case list independently and then testing it against every official claim we could find. Of the six institutional, RTI and Commission-level claims we examined at Madras and Kanpur, none held up as originally framed. One cited ruling turned out to reach the opposite conclusion from what was claimed of it. And across all three institutes, not one primary document was retrieved in full for any individual death. That is not an allegation of concealment. We found no evidence of that and we do not claim it. It is a description of a record that cannot be checked — and a figure that cannot be checked cannot support accountability in any direction. So we are not asking for this data to be collected or reported. The Court has already required both. We are asking for the resulting record to be published in a form that can be verified, and we have set out exactly what that standard should be.
9 directions
issued by the Supreme Court in January 2026 under Article 142 on student deaths in higher education. Four concern data and reporting.
0
of those nine directions require the resulting record to be published where the public can check it. The word does not appear in them.
3 of 23
IITs have been audited in depth by Aarunya so far. The remaining 20 have not been examined — not audited does not mean zero.
What the Supreme Court already requires
On 15 January 2026, in Amit Kumar & Ors. v. Union of India & Ors. (2026 INSC 62), the Supreme Court issued nine directions "in exercise of our plenary powers under Article 142 of the Constitution of India." Four concern data and reporting. In the Court's own words: (i) "The Sample Registration System data on Suicides, especially those falling within the age group of 15-29 years, must be centrally maintained for better and more accurate estimates of Deaths by Suicide of students in HEIs." (ii) "The NCRB, in its annual report, must distinguish between school-going students and students of higher education in its categorisation of 'student suicides'…" (iii) "All HEIs must report any incident of suicide or unnatural death of a student, regardless of the location of its occurrence (i.e. on campus, hostels, PG accommodations, or otherwise outside the institutional premises), to the police authorities no sooner they come to know about the incident. This should cover all students - irrespective of whether they are studying in the classroom, distance or online mode of learning." (iv) "…an annual report of student suicides or unnatural deaths must also be submitted to the UGC & all other relevant regulatory bodies for professional courses (e.g. AICTE, NMC, DCI, BCI etc.). In case of Central Universities and Institutes of National Importance… or any HEI that does not fall within the above-mentioned framework, it must be reported to the Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Education, Government of India." The other five concern institutional conditions: round-the-clock qualified medical help on campus or within one kilometre for every residential institution; all vacant faculty positions, both teaching and non-teaching, filled within four months with priority to reserved posts; Vice-Chancellor, Registrar and other key posts filled within four months, with annual reporting to central and state governments on how many reserved posts are vacant, filled, and why; scholarship backlogs cleared within four months, with no student barred from an examination, a hostel or a class because of a disbursement delay; and strict compliance with the UGC regulations on ragging (2009), equity (2012), sexual harassment (2016) and student grievance redressal (2023). Two things follow, and they matter for what comes next. The IITs are Institutes of National Importance, so their annual reports go to the Department of Higher Education. And nothing in these nine directions requires any of this to be published — we searched the full judgment; the word does not appear in that sense anywhere in them. Everything in the next section is Aarunya's proposal. The Court has ordered none of it.
Why this matters
The Court built the machinery. The public still cannot see inside it.
In January 2026 the Supreme Court required central maintenance of suicide data for ages 15–29, required the NCRB to separate school students from higher-education students, required institutions to report student suicides and unnatural deaths to police immediately, and required annual reports to the UGC, the professional regulators, or — for the IITs and other Institutes of National Importance — the Department of Higher Education. What no direction requires is that any of this reach the public in a checkable form. The reports go to a regulator or a ministry, not to citizens. There is no shared definition, no shared classification, no case identifier and no independent audit. The machinery exists. The window does not.
A number nobody can check cannot hold anyone to account
Parliament has been given all-IIT totals. RTI applicants have been given institute-level counts. Independent compilers have published far larger cumulative figures. Each may be accurate on its own terms, but they cover different periods, different institutions and different definitions, and the documents behind almost all of them cannot be retrieved by a member of the public. That is the accountability failure: not that a figure is too high or too low, but that nobody outside the system can test it.
We tested the record, and the official-looking figures held up worst
Across three deep institute audits, individual deaths reported case by case held up well under checking. The aggregate claims meant to explain the scale did not. Of six institutional, RTI and Commission claims examined at IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur, none verified as originally framed. One cited Commission ruling reached the opposite conclusion from what was claimed of it — it upheld non-disclosure. The one clean reconciliation achieved anywhere worked precisely because its period, institute and definition all lined up.
This is fixable under existing powers
Everything proposed here can be implemented by regulators, the Ministry and the institutions themselves. It needs no new primary legislation and no fresh litigation. It asks for counts, classifications and traceability — not the personal details of any student, which a Commission proceeding in 2026 declined to order disclosed on privacy grounds, and which we are not asking for either.
What we are asking for
- 1NATIONAL REFORM 1 · Adopt a single definition of "student" for death reporting across all higher education, consistent with the Supreme Court's direction that reporting cover classroom, distance and online students alike, with a companion register recording every other campus death separately. Done when a regulator has published the definition and institutions report against it.
- 2NATIONAL REFORM 2 · Adopt one classification vocabulary across all institutions and regulators, distinguishing confirmed, officially classified, suspected, undetermined, accidental, natural and homicide cases, and require every published total to state which categories it includes. Done when a published national total names its categories.
- 3TRANSPARENCY 3 · Require institute totals and national totals to reconcile for each year, with any variance published and explained. Done when a national figure is published alongside the institute figures that sum to it.
- 4TRANSPARENCY 4 · The Supreme Court already requires an annual report of student suicides and unnatural deaths to be submitted to the UGC, the professional regulators, or — for the IITs and other Institutes of National Importance — the Department of Higher Education. Aarunya proposes that these reports be published: institute-wise, year-wise, machine-readable. Done when they are downloadable without an RTI application.
- 5TRANSPARENCY 5 · Assign a permanent case identifier at first report, carried unchanged through institute, ministry and national records. Done when a citizen can trace one case identifier across all three.
- 6TRANSPARENCY 6 · Publish a correction history whenever a figure changes, showing the previous value, the new value, the date and the reason. Done when a revised figure is published with its prior value still visible.
- 7TRANSPARENCY 7 · Commission an independent annual audit of a sample of records against their underlying documents, by a body that does not report to the institutions audited, published in full including failures. Done when the first such audit is published.
- 8IIT REFORM 8 · Every IIT publishes its own student-death register for the last ten years on its own website, using the standard above — in addition to the annual report it already owes the Department of Higher Education. Done when all 23 registers are online.
- 9IIT REFORM 9 · Where an institution has previously given a figure to Parliament, a Commission or an RTI applicant, it publishes the underlying record — or states plainly that it cannot, and why. Done when each previously published figure carries either its record or that statement.
- 10STUDENT SUPPORT 10 · Publish compliance against the Supreme Court's January 2026 directions institution by institution — round-the-clock medical access within one kilometre, all vacant teaching and non-teaching posts filled within four months, key administrative posts filled within four months, scholarship backlogs cleared within four months. These obligations already exist; what is missing is a public record of who has met them. Done when a compliance table is published per institution.
- 11STUDENT SUPPORT 11 · Verify mental-health infrastructure claims independently before publication, stating the date and the population each figure describes. In our audits most such figures could not be located, or described a different population or a different institute. Done when published counsellor and helpline figures carry a verification date and a defined population.
Facts & sources
Every number here is checkable
We link the source for each claim and record the date we last verified it. If you find something wrong, tell us and we will correct it in public.
On 24 March 2025, in Amit Kumar & Ors. v. Union of India, Criminal Appeal No. 1425 of 2025, the Supreme Court recorded the deaths of two IIT Delhi students on 08.07.2023 and 01.09.2023, set aside the High Court's refusal to order registration of a criminal complaint, and held that information disclosing a cognizable offence must be registered as an FIR under section 154.
Supreme Court of India, 2025 INSC 384 · court record · verified 2026-08-23
Verified
The official PDF at this URL could not be parsed on retrieval. The judgment's content is confirmed against a full reproduction of its text; the URL is published because it is the official location of the document.
On 15 January 2026, exercising its powers under Article 142, the Supreme Court issued nine directions (2026 INSC 62). Four concern data: Sample Registration System suicide data for ages 15–29 centrally maintained; the NCRB to distinguish school-going students from higher-education students; every institution to report any student suicide or unnatural death to police as soon as it knows, regardless of where the death occurred and whether the student studied in classroom, distance or online mode; and an annual report of such deaths to the UGC and professional regulators, or — for Central Universities and Institutes of National Importance, which include the IITs — to the Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Education. Five concern conditions: round-the-clock medical help on campus or within one kilometre; all vacant faculty positions, both teaching and non-teaching, filled within four months with priority to reserved posts; key administrative posts filled within four months with annual reporting on reserved-post vacancies; scholarship backlogs cleared within four months, with no student barred from examinations, hostel or class for a disbursement delay; and full compliance with the UGC regulations of 2009, 2012, 2016 and 2023.
Supreme Court of India, 2026 INSC 62, paragraph 45 · court record · verified 2026-08-23
Verified
Read from the official Supreme Court PDF — 38 pages, paragraph 45 quoted directly.
None of the nine directions requires the resulting record to be published where the public can check it. The directions require reporting to the police, to regulators and to the Ministry. They establish no shared definition of "student", no shared classification vocabulary, no case identifier, no obligation for institute and national totals to reconcile, no correction history, and no independent audit.
Supreme Court of India, 2026 INSC 62, paragraph 45 · court record · verified 2026-08-23
Verified
Established by reading the full 38-page judgment and searching it for publication language: the only occurrence of "website" refers to the National Task Force's own survey site, and no direction in paragraph 45 requires public disclosure. This is a statement about this judgment, not a claim that no such requirement exists anywhere else in Indian law.
Aarunya's own audit reports cite two different all-IIT student-suicide figures for the same stated period of 2018–2023: 39, from an answer the Delhi report dates 27 July 2023, and 33, from an answer the Kanpur report dates 16 March 2023. Both are described as IIT-only for that period. The audit does not establish why the two figures differ, and Aarunya selects neither as correct.
Aarunya IIT student death audit, Delhi report section 6 and Kanpur report section E · parliamentary record · verified 2026-08-27
Primary source not located
Neither parliamentary answer was retrieved as an official document; both reach the audit through secondary reporting. Aarunya presents neither as a settled national figure. A provenance conflict is now recorded: Aarunya's own report attributes the figure of 39 to a parliamentary answer it dates 27 July 2023, while later secondary reporting attributes 39 to data placed before the Supreme Court. These may refer to the same underlying figure at different stages, but that has not been established and Aarunya does not resolve it.
Aarunya's Delhi and Kanpur reports also differ on which parliamentary answer the combined figure of 61 for IITs, NITs and IIMs belongs to — the Delhi report associates it with the answer it dates 27 July 2023, the Kanpur report with the answer it dates 16 March 2023.
Aarunya IIT student death audit, Delhi report section 6 and Kanpur report section E · parliamentary record · verified 2026-08-27
Unresolved
Recorded rather than resolved. Aarunya does not determine which attribution is correct.
A parliamentary answer dated 20 December 2021 reported 34 student suicides across all IITs for 2014–2021, with a category breakdown of SC 5, ST 0, OBC 13 and Minority 0. It is an all-IIT aggregate and cannot be mapped to any single institute.
Aarunya IIT student death audit, Kanpur report section E · parliamentary record · verified 2026-08-27
Primary source not located
The original answer was not retrieved; it reaches the audit through secondary reporting.
An independent compilation reported a cumulative pan-IIT figure of 115 for 2005–2024, later restated at approximately 160. It combined RTI responses from only 13 of the 23 IITs with National Crime Records Bureau statistics and parliamentary answers to fill the gaps, and the total moved without a republished institute-by-institute breakdown.
Aarunya IIT student death audit, Madras report sections D and E, Kanpur report sections E and G · Aarunya audit · verified 2026-08-27
Unresolved
An attributed claim by a named compiler, not audited data. Aarunya's own reports differ on the date of the later restatement — one records March 2026, the other August 2026 — and that conflict is not resolved here.
Figures of 26 for IIT Madras and 18 for IIT Kanpur, both for 2005–2024, are single lines of that same compilation rather than verified institute totals.
Aarunya IIT student death audit, Madras report section E and Kanpur report sections E and G · Aarunya audit · verified 2026-08-27
Unresolved
Neither is a clean single-institute RTI figure. Aarunya does not publish either as an established institute total.
Four second appeals concerning IIT Madras, IIT Jodhpur, IIT Goa and IIT Kanpur were heard together by the Central Information Commission on 15 April 2026 and decided on 30 April 2026. The appeals sought details of students who had died by suicide or unnatural death. IIT Madras disclosed aggregate death numbers by year for 2019 to 2025; IIT Kanpur disclosed gender, academic programme, date, native state and location; IIT Jodhpur reported nil cases; IIT Goa withheld information as third-party personal data. Names, age and caste were withheld throughout under section 8(1)(j) of the Right to Information Act, and the Commission upheld that withholding. The Commission recorded a persistent crisis of multiple suicides annually across campuses, with high concentration at IIT Kanpur and IIT Kharagpur, and recommended high-level committees together with proactive disclosure of information about those committees.
Central Information Commission, decision of 30 April 2026 in CIC/IITMD/A/2025/634151, CIC/IITJP/A/2025/634132, CIC/IITGO/A/2025/634131 and CIC/IITKP/A/2025/636407 · CIC order · verified 2026-09-02
Verified
Read from the order itself. It establishes what each institute disclosed or withheld in these four proceedings, the section relied on, and the Commission's own observations and recommendations. It does not establish a national IIT suicide total, does not verify Aarunya's cross-institute count of 29, and is not evidence for any individual death within that count. Names, age and caste remain withheld, and Aarunya does not seek them.
Research inherited by the audit cited a Commission case under a name that could not be located in the Commission's searchable database at the time of the audit, and characterised it as authority that IIT suicide data had been ordered disclosed. The Commission's decision of 30 April 2026 cites that earlier matter as CIC/DS/A/2011/004488/RM, dated 1 February 2013, and records that it directed the institute to provide only the number of students who had died by suicide, expressly holding that personal information need not be provided. The inherited characterisation was therefore right that aggregate numbers had been ordered disclosed, and wrong to the extent it implied personal details had been. Aarunya's own earlier correction, which described the adjacent case as having upheld non-disclosure outright, was itself too broad and is corrected here.
Aarunya IIT student death audit, Kanpur report section G · CIC order · verified 2026-09-02
Corrected
Corrected against the primary source. The earlier matter is cited within the 30 April 2026 order rather than retrieved as a standalone document, so its case number and holding are taken from that order. Aarunya does not publish the name under which the citation was originally inherited.
Across three completed deep institute audits — IIT Delhi, IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur — 29 cases are classified as suicide or suspected suicide: 9, 11 and 9 respectively, from 49 leads examined and 42 deaths of all affiliations documented. This is NOT a national IIT total; it covers 3 of India's 23 IITs.
Aarunya IIT student death audit, overall report · Aarunya audit · verified 2026-08-27
A floor rather than a ceiling: it reflects what could be independently verified, so a death never reported would not appear in it. The remaining 20 IITs have not been examined and no figure is published for them.
Of the six institutional, RTI and Commission-level claims examined across IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur, none verified as originally framed.
Aarunya IIT student death audit, overall report section 4 · Aarunya audit · verified 2026-08-27
The summary of the overall report states this as nine claims across those two institutes. Its own master table gives six, with nine being the total across all three institutes including Delhi, where two claims did verify. The controlling figure is 0 of 6.
No FIR text, post-mortem report, inquest finding, court order, RTI reply or Commission order was retrieved in full for any individual death at any of the three institutes audited. Every individual classification rests on contemporary journalism, with two exceptions where a genuine institutional document was located.
Aarunya IIT student death audit, overall report section 4 · Aarunya audit · verified 2026-08-27
Primary source not located
The largest and most consistent evidence gap in the programme, and the reason all three institutes stand at conditional pass rather than fully verified.
IIT Delhi's 9 comprise 6 cases classified as suicide by police or the institution and 3 classified as suspected or provisional. No IIT Delhi case in the audit reaches the standard of a judicially established finding.
Aarunya IIT student death audit, Delhi report section 6 · Aarunya audit · verified 2026-08-23
The third provisional IIT Delhi case is a postgraduate student who died in August 2026. As of the audit there was no institute statement and no police classification, the case was one day old, and it was expressly not upgraded on the basis of media word choice.
Aarunya IIT student death audit, Delhi report sections 3 and 7 · Aarunya audit · verified 2026-08-23
Provisional
RE-CHECK REQUIRED — this case remains provisional and must be re-checked, per the audit. No institute statement and no police classification. Counted in the 9 and excluded from the Delhi report's own closing count of 8 — see corrections. NOT described as a confirmed suicide.
An RTI reply reported 6 suicides at IIT Delhi across academic years 2019-20 to 2023-24. Counting the police-classified and provisional cases — codes B and C — in the audit's independently built Delhi ledger by Indian academic year over the same window also gives exactly 6. This is the only clean reconciliation between an official figure and an independent count anywhere in the programme.
Aarunya IIT student death audit, Delhi report sections 2 and 6 · RTI reply · verified 2026-08-23
Primary source not located
The RTI reply itself was not retrieved; the figure reaches the audit through contemporary reporting of the reply. The 6 matched are specifically the B and C cases in that window, not all documented deaths.
A published account described a March 2026 IIT Delhi death as the "eighth suicide since 2021." The audit's ledger finds six by that date. The two-case gap is unexplained and the underlying data is not cited in the source. Aarunya does not publish "8 since 2021" as a verified figure.
Aarunya IIT student death audit, Delhi report sections 2 and 6 · Aarunya audit · verified 2026-08-23
Unresolved
At IIT Madras, 19 leads were examined, 11 individual student deaths met the threshold for inclusion, and 6 were correctly excluded — three postdoctoral scholars, one faculty member, one faculty spouse with no institutional affiliation of her own, and one student of a different institution resident on campus.
Aarunya IIT student death audit, Madras report sections B and C · Aarunya audit · verified 2026-08-27
At IIT Kanpur, 17 leads were examined, 9 individual student deaths met the threshold for inclusion, and 4 were correctly excluded — a security guard, an assistant professor, an assistant registrar and a postdoctoral researcher. Two further institutional claims — a statement of "2 suicides since 2014" and an RTI figure of 17 deaths for 2005–2025 — matched no locatable document.
Aarunya IIT student death audit, Kanpur report sections B, C and E · Aarunya audit · verified 2026-08-27
Primary source not located
The exclusion of the assistant professor was confirmed against the institute's own departmental memorial page — one of only two genuine institutional documents located in the entire programme. Aarunya publishes neither the "2 since 2014" nor the "17" figure.
Independent verification found specific, material errors in the research the audit started from. An allegation about academic backlogs at IIT Kanpur was traced to an unrelated student who shared a surname. A claim that an IIT Madras supervisor had been restricted from a lab after a death inverted the true, opposite fact. A cited count of "34 recommendations" matched no located document. Ten of ten flagged non-student exclusions were, by contrast, confirmed correct.
Aarunya IIT student death audit, overall report section 4 · Aarunya audit · verified 2026-08-27
A parliamentary answer dated 2 December 2019 reported 50 student suicides across the IITs over the preceding five years, and the reporting states the deaths occurred at 12 of the 23 IITs. The institute-wise figures carried in that reporting name IIT Guwahati at 14, IIT Bombay at 7 and IIT Madras at 7, with the remaining 22 spread across nine other IITs that the reporting does not name.
Parliamentary answer of 2 December 2019, as reported in contemporary journalism · parliamentary record · verified 2026-09-02
Primary source not located
PRIMARY SOURCE NOT LOCATED — the parliamentary answer itself was not retrieved; this reaches Aarunya as a reported parliamentary figure. It is published as a reported figure, not a verified one. Its period and institutional scope both differ from Aarunya's own audits, and the named breakdown accounts for three of the twelve institutes only. It is not comparable with, and must not be added to, Aarunya's 29.
An RTI response reported 27 student suicides across 10 of the IITs between 2014 and 2019. The institute figures carried in that reporting include IIT Madras at 7, IIT Kharagpur at 5, and IIT Delhi and IIT Hyderabad at 3 each.
RTI response, as reported by The Statesman · RTI reply · verified 2026-09-02
Primary source not located
PRIMARY SOURCE NOT LOCATED — the RTI response itself was not retrieved; this is a secondary report of an RTI reply. Its scope covers 10 of the 23 IITs over a different period from Aarunya's audits, and without the underlying records it is not comparable with Aarunya's 29 and must not be added to it.
Aarunya's proposed Student Death Reporting Standard
None of what follows has been ordered by any court. It is Aarunya's proposed reform, built on the classification discipline we tested across three institute audits. The Court has required this information to be collected and reported. We propose making the resulting record publicly checkable. D1 · One definition of "student", and a companion register. Primary register: persons enrolled in a degree or diploma programme on the date of death, across every mode of enrolment — which aligns with the Court's own direction that reporting cover classroom, distance and online students alike. Companion register: every other death on institutional premises or of institutionally affiliated persons — postdoctoral researchers, faculty, administrative and contract staff, security personnel, family members in institutional housing, students of other institutions resident on campus — recorded separately, never merged into the student count. In our audits, ten of ten flagged non-student cases were correctly excluded on checking, which is why both errors need preventing. D2 · A classification vocabulary that grades evidence rather than guessing outcomes. Aarunya's proposed vocabulary: A — confirmed suicide, finally established, for example by a judicial finding. B — police or institutionally classified suicide. C — suspected or provisional suicide. D — undetermined death. E — accidental death. F — natural or medical death. G — homicide investigation open. H — judicially established homicide. Two operating rules: a classification may be upgraded only on new official evidence, never because media wording changed; and every published total must state which codes it includes, because "suicide" alone is ambiguous while "A and B" is not. D3 · A permanent case identifier. Institute–year–sequence, assigned at first report, never reused, never renumbered — so the same case can be followed from the institute register to the Ministry's annual report to any national total. D4 · The record itself. One row per death, with every field carrying a value or an explicit reason it is unavailable. Case identifier; institute; academic and calendar year; register; programme level only, never programme name; classification code; whether confirmed, provisional or unresolved; whether police were informed and when; FIR status; investigation status; external inquiry status; final classification or "pending"; source documents each marked public or withheld with a reason; last verified date; version number; correction log. "Not recorded" and "pending" are legitimate published values. A zero standing in for "we did not look" is not. D5 · Publication, institute-wise and year-wise. Each institution publishes its register annually on a fixed date in machine-readable form on its own website. The recipient — regulator or Ministry — publishes the aggregate institute by institute and year by year, never as a single national number without the breakdown beneath it. Historical years are republished each time, so a changed past figure is visible rather than quietly replaced. D6 · Reconciliation, made mandatory. The sum of institute registers must equal the published national total for the same year, register and code set; where it does not, the variance is published with its reason. This is the direct answer to two ministerial answers giving different all-IIT figures for the same stated period with nothing published to explain why. D7 · Privacy by default. No names. No programme name, department, hostel or any field identifying an individual within a small cohort. No cause-of-death narrative, no personal circumstances, no medical history. Category data such as caste, gender or disability published only in aggregate at national level, never per case. A family may ask for a name to be associated with a case; the default is never. This is deliberately built to survive the privacy objection that succeeded before the Central Information Commission in 2026 — it asks for counts, classifications and traceability, none of which requires identifying anyone. D8 · An independent annual audit. A sample of records checked against their underlying documents each year, by a body that does not report to the institutions being audited, published in full including failures. Each institution receives a status — verified, conditional, or not verified — on the same evidence standard we applied to ourselves.
What a citizen should be able to see
Pick an institute. Pick a year. See what is known and how well it is known, without filing an RTI application. Each row shows institute, year, register, classification code, number of cases, whether confirmed, provisional or unresolved, a link to the underlying document, the date last verified, and how many corrections have been made. Four rules separate a dashboard from a press release. Every cell traces to a document or states why it cannot. "Not audited" and "not reported" are visible states, never rendered as zero. Codes are never silently merged — a total may combine categories, but must say which and show the split. Corrections are a column, not a footnote.
Questions
What exactly is Aarunya asking for?+
That the student-death data institutions are already required to collect and report be published in a form a citizen can check — a shared definition, a shared classification, a case identifier, reconciliation between institute and national totals, a correction history and an independent audit.
Hasn't the Supreme Court already fixed this?+
It has fixed a large part. In January 2026 it required central data maintenance, NCRB disaggregation, immediate police reporting, and annual reports to the UGC, the professional regulators, or — for the IITs and other Institutes of National Importance — the Department of Higher Education. What it did not require is that any of this be published where the public can check it. That gap is what this issue addresses.
Is the A–H classification a legal standard?+
No. It is Aarunya's proposed vocabulary, developed and tested across three institute audits. No court or regulator has adopted it, and we do not claim otherwise.
What is the national number of student suicides in the IITs?+
We do not know, and on the current record neither does anyone who cannot obtain the underlying documents. Several figures exist for different periods and institution sets. We have not selected one as the truth; establishing that number is what we are asking for.
What does the "29" mean?+
29 cases classified as suicide or suspected suicide in the three completed institute audits — IIT Delhi, IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur. This is NOT a national IIT total. It covers 3 of India's 23 IITs and is a floor even for those three, because it reflects only what could be independently verified.
Does "not audited" mean an IIT has had no student deaths?+
No. It means we have not examined it. We publish no figure, not even zero, for an institute we have not audited.
Why can't the published figures be added together?+
Because they count different things over different periods for different sets of institutions. Adding them produces a number with no definition attached to it.
Two official figures for the same period differ. Which is right?+
We do not know. Our reports record 39 from an answer dated 27 July 2023 and 33 from one dated 16 March 2023, both described as IIT-only for 2018–2023. The audit does not establish why they differ, and we select neither. That is precisely the problem this issue is about.
Why do some primary documents remain unavailable?+
Obtaining them requires filing RTIs and retrieving court and Commission records directly — a separate phase from verifying leads. We label every affected claim rather than presenting a news report as though it were the document.
Why don't you publish the names?+
Because we are asking institutions to publish counts, classifications and traceability without identifying anyone, and we hold ourselves to the same rule. A public register does not need a name to be verifiable.
Is Aarunya claiming institutions deliberately falsified figures?+
No. We found no evidence of falsification or concealment and do not allege it. We found a record that cannot be checked. Those are different claims and we will not blur them.
What would cause Aarunya to correct this issue?+
Any primary document that contradicts a claim here, any case wrongly included or excluded, any date we got wrong. We have already corrected our own reports on this page and will do so again, dated, with the original wording retained.
Where this stands
The whole process, in public
We publish each step as it happens — including the steps where nothing happens.
Supreme Court orders FIR registration in two IIT Delhi student deaths
24 March 2025The Court set aside the High Court's refusal and held that information disclosing a cognizable offence must be registered as an FIR.
Supreme Court issues nine directions on student deaths in higher education
15 January 2026Directions issued under Article 142. Four concern data: central maintenance of suicide data for ages 15-29, NCRB disaggregation, immediate police reporting wherever a death occurs and whatever the mode of study, and annual reports to the UGC, the professional regulators, or the Department of Higher Education for Institutes of National Importance such as the IITs. None requires publication.
Information Commission upholds non-disclosure of IIT suicide demographics
~27 May 2026A proceeding against four IITs sought demographic details of students who died by suicide since 2005. Non-disclosure was upheld on privacy grounds and no figure was released.
Source: Order text not retrieved — PRIMARY SOURCE NOT LOCATED
IIT Delhi audit completed — conditional pass
23 August 202613 deaths documented, 9 classified as suicide or suspected suicide. One RTI figure reconciled exactly against the independently built ledger — the only clean reconciliation in the programme so far.
IIT Madras audit completed — conditional pass
27 August 202619 leads examined, 11 verified, 6 correctly excluded. Both institutional-number claims failed to hold up as originally framed.
IIT Kanpur audit completed — conditional pass
27 August 202617 leads examined, 9 verified, 4 correctly excluded. All three institutional-data claims failed; one cited case reached the opposite conclusion from what was claimed.
Standard published; programme open
27 August 2026The proposed Student Death Reporting Standard is published for adoption. Three IITs are at conditional pass; 20 are not audited.
Next institute audit, and the primary documents
The programme continues one institute at a time. In parallel: fresh RTIs, the Commission order text, and the court documents that would move any institute from conditional pass to fully verified.
The IIT-by-IIT verification programme
A standing research programme, expanded one institute at a time. Four statuses: Not audited — not examined, no figure of any kind shown. In progress — under way, nothing published until complete. Conditional pass — case list built and corroborated, at least one gap remaining, typically no primary document retrieved. Fully verified — at least one primary document per case and every institutional claim reconciled. IIT Delhi — Conditional pass — 9 cases (6 code B, 3 code C). What would close the gap: a fresh 2024–2026 RTI; the January 2024 High Court order; a police classification for the August 2026 case. IIT Madras — Conditional pass — 11 cases. What would close the gap: one retrieved primary document; the Commission order text; a fresh RTI. IIT Kanpur — Conditional pass — 9 cases. What would close the gap: one retrieved primary document; the Commission order text; the Ministry order naming a review committee; a precisely scoped RTI. The remaining 20 IITs — Not audited. No figures shown, and none inferred. The combined figure, stated in full: 29 cases classified as suicide or suspected suicide in the three completed institute audits — IIT Delhi, IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur. This is NOT a national IIT total. It covers three of India's 23 IITs, and is a floor even for those three, because it reflects what could be independently verified — a death never reported would not appear in it. Not all 29 are confirmed suicides: most rest on a police or institutional classification, several are explicitly provisional, and none reaches the standard of a judicially established finding. An institute marked "Not audited" has not been examined. It has not been found to have no deaths. Nothing on this page should be added into a national figure.
Methodology, limitations and corrections
Method. Every case began as a lead, never a fact. Leads were checked against court records, government and parliamentary documents, official institute statements, police records, RTI and Commission material, and contemporary journalism — in that order. A case entered a count only when at least two independent contemporary sources agreed on the core facts. Enrolled degree-seeking students only; postdoctoral researchers, faculty, staff, family members and students of other institutions were documented and then excluded. How to read the evidence labels. Each fact carries a label describing the state of its evidence, not the seriousness of the claim. Verified — the primary source was retrieved and independently checked. Primary source not located — a credible source reports the figure, but the underlying primary document was not retrieved. Unresolved — sources conflict, or the scope or attribution cannot presently be established. Corrected — a previously published or inherited claim was demonstrably corrected. Provisional — the case or figure remains subject to a re-check. No label — the statement describes Aarunya's own process rather than an externally verified claim. An absent label never means verified. A–H are Aarunya's own working codes, including the "code B" and "code C" references in the verification programme above. No court, regulator, ministry or other government body has adopted these codes. Why the public figures cannot simply be added up. Parliamentary answers, RTI responses, institutional statements and independent compilations each report figures for student deaths at the IITs, but they differ in period, institutional scope, population counted, classification and methodology, and in almost every case the underlying document cannot be retrieved by a member of the public. Aarunya's case-level audits of three IITs record 29 cases classified in those audits as suicide or suspected suicide. This is not a national total and must not be added to the separately reported figures below. Independent journalism has reached the same conclusion about the reconciliation problem; that corroborates the difficulty, and establishes no particular number. The compiler associated with the larger independent IIT suicide-count compilation is also reported as the appellant in the CIC matter concerning IIT disclosure. This is provenance context, not independent verification of either figure. A report referred to in the research process as the "Top 7" report could not be independently located in the project, storage, or expanded web search. The closest located material is a 2 December 2019 Lok Sabha answer containing an institute-wise breakdown. We do not assert that the two are the same document. The central limitation. Not one FIR, post-mortem report, inquest finding, court order, RTI reply or Commission order was retrieved in full for any individual death at any of the three institutes. Every classification rests on contemporary journalism, with two exceptions where a genuine institutional document was located. All three institutes stand at conditional pass; none is fully verified. What this does not establish. Not a national count. It does not establish why any individual student died. It finds no named person responsible for anything. It does not allege that any institute falsified or concealed information. It does not treat its own numbers as final. Corrections to our own work. The summary of our overall report says nine institutional claims were examined across IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur and none held up. Its own master table gives six for those two institutes — nine is the total across all three including Delhi, where two claims did hold up. The controlling figure is 0 of 6, and the summary wording was wrong. Our cross-institute table and the Delhi case reconciliation both count 9 for IIT Delhi — six code B, three code C. The Delhi report's closing certification block counts 8, excluding the third provisional case, a postgraduate student who died in August 2026 days before that audit closed. We publish 9 and name the difference. That case has no institute statement and no police classification, our own report says it must be re-checked before publication, and it is not described here as a confirmed suicide. Our Delhi report cites 39 IIT student suicides for 2018–2023, from an answer it dates 27 July 2023. Our Kanpur report cites 33 for the same stated period, from an answer it dates 16 March 2023. The audit does not establish why the two figures differ, and Aarunya selects neither as correct. Our two reports also differ on which of those answers the combined figure of 61 for IITs, NITs and IIMs belongs to. We record both discrepancies rather than resolving them by inference. Our reports also differ on the date of a later restatement of an independent compilation's pan-IIT total to approximately 160 — one records March 2026, the other August 2026. We state the figure as an attributed compilation claim and note that our own files disagree on the date. Research cutoff. Research was checked on 23 and 27 August 2026. No claim was re-checked after 27 August 2026. Two reported figures were added to this page on 2 September 2026 from contemporary journalism, each labelled primary source not located. If any claim on this page is shown to be wrong, we will correct it here, dated, with the original wording retained.
Who is behind this
Aarunya Issues is an initiative of Aarunya Swaraj Party. We are new, we are small, and we would rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise. What we can promise is that every claim we publish is sourced, every number we report is real, and we will publish the outcome of each issue whether or not it goes our way.
Hello, Since I was a child, I have believed that my purpose is to serve my country. As I grew older, I realized that real change does not happen by only discussing problems—it happens when ordinary people come together, raise their voices, and work toward practical solutions. That is why I started Aarunya Issues. This platform is for every student, every worker, every farmer, every researcher, every entrepreneur, every citizen, and especially for those whose voices often go unheard. If you feel that nobody is listening to your concerns, I want you to know that your voice matters here. Our mission is simple: identify real problems, study them honestly, present practical solutions, and build public support for positive change. We believe every issue deserves facts, transparency, respectful discussion, and accountability—not empty promises. Many people ask me: “Is this a political movement?” My answer is simple: Yes. We believe lasting change requires public participation, good governance, and responsible leadership. Our long-term vision is to build a movement that serves people with honesty, integrity, and transparency, and we intend to participate in future elections to take these ideas from public discussion to public policy. But before asking for votes, we want to earn trust through our work, our ideas, and our commitment to solving real problems. This journey is bigger than one person. It belongs to everyone who believes India can do better. If you believe students deserve better opportunities, if you believe public institutions should work better, if you believe every citizen deserves to be heard, then I invite you to stand with us. We are just getting started. Together, let us raise our voices for those who have no voice, stand beside those who are ignored, and work to build an India that is more transparent, more accountable, more compassionate, and full of opportunity for every citizen. The future is not something we wait for. It is something we build—together. Jai Hind. @students from IIT/NIT/...... THANKS
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