Last week, a young man who might have gone on to become an energy expert — and who knows, contributed to finding answers to some of the vexed questions on oil, fossil fuels, renewables — took his life. The circumstances surrounding his death at one of India’s premier technical institutions, IIT-Bombay, are being investigated. But the sharply polarised accounts of what happened suggest that establishing the immediate cause will not answer the larger questions raised by the tragedy. In the last decade, IITs have seen over 170 deaths by suicide, a large number of them by students from SC and ST communities. What is it about these institutions and the experiences of students within them that can make them feel so isolated and overwhelmed?

Prestigious institutions are, of course, not immune to the strains, power structures, hierarchies and discriminatory practices of society at large. Students arrive from very different social backgrounds and enter a system where the pressure to excel can acquire an outsized importance. For those from marginalised communities, admission does not ipso facto guarantee equality. The burden can be greater still if they also have to negotiate subtle prejudice or the persistent feeling that they do not quite belong.

The immediate response to such tragedies is often to frame them as........

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