A 17-year-old student from Bihar was found hanging in his room in the Mahavir Nagar-II area of Kota on Tuesday morning, the third such suicide in four days in the Rajasthan city that is a hub for coaching institutes for IIT aspirants.
According to news reports, this is the 19th such incident this year. Thousands of students stay and prepare for the highly competitive entrance examinations in Kota.
Hindustan Times quoted Rajasthan Police’s assistant sub-inspector Ramswaroop as saying that the student was found hanging from a ceiling fan by his cousin, who is also a student in Kota, after his parents called him.
The parents were worried because they could not get in touch with their son.
Reports say that the dead student had been preparing for the IIT-JEE exams for the past three years.
Times of India quoted Ishwar Singh, sub-inspector at Mahavir Nagar police station, as saying that the teenager had been preparing for the IIT-JEE entrance in a “premier institute” of Kota for the past three years.
No suicide note was found and the body was sent for post-mortem, the police said.
On 23 December, a 17-year-old NEET-aspirant had committed suicide. Hindustan Times had reported that the girl, a resident of Kushinagar in Uttar Pradesh, hanged herself in her hostel room in Adarsh Nagar of Kunhadi area.
A Class 12 student, preparing for IIT-JEE, hanged himself inside his coaching institute on Saturday.
HuffPost India had reported in 2016 that between 2011 and 2016, 57 students had committed suicide in Kota.
The report had shown that while the prospective of getting admission into IIT secured a bright future, more than a million people competing for 5,000 seats racked up the pressure.
The coaching institutes are also very expensive. The HuffPost India report said that parents could end up spending over Rs 15-20 lakh over five or six years. Living up to the expectations of parents, peer pressure and even failure, the report had found, led to the high number of suicides.