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Wednesday, January 16, 2013

181 - Panel for counselling to check student suicides in tech campus

Panel for counselling to check student suicides in tech campus

Press Trust of India / New Delhi November 15, 2012, 19:55

Atributing rising suicide cases in technical institutes including IITs to academics related stress and other reasons, a panel set up to address the issue has emphasised on regular counselling along with constitution of a monitoring cell in HRD Ministry.

The panel has proposed a holistic model for institutes to emulate. This model is based on the some of the best counselling models followed by institutes such as IIT Kanpur, IIT Madras, IIT Kharagpur and Tata Institute of Social Sciences Mumbai, said sources in the HRD Ministry.

The panel headed by IIT Kanpur chairman M Anandakrishnan submitted its report to HRD Minister M M Pallam Raju today, who was positive about it, sources said.

The team studied about 26 centrally funded techical institutes, observing that during the last two years there has been about 12 suicides in campuses.

During the course of preparing the report, the panel also compared the suicide rates in international campus in comparision to Indian institutes.

Attributing such incidence to academic related stress, personality problem, drug addiction, failed love etc, it said that the monitoring mechanism in the Ministry should also engage in doing a social analysis of the suicides and developing strategies to stop them.

The institutions, it suggested, need to hold regular counselling sessions and encourage students to seek assistance from specialists.
Increasing cases of suicides in IIT campuses has been a matter of concern for the IIT council which has periodically been stressing on an effective mecanism to curb it.