A 20-year-old student from Andhra Pradesh, pursuing Electronics and Communication Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology-Guwahati (IIT-G), was found hanging in his hostel room on Monday evening.
IIT-G officials said other boarders altered the guards after they found Pannem Pavan Siddhardha had not emerged from his room for an unusually long time. “We are yet to ascertain the reason behind his death,” an official of the technology institute said on Tuesday.
The parents of Siddardha called up his friends at IIT-G around 5 p.m. asking them to connect him to them as Pannem was not picking up his phone, sources said. On entering his room, the friends found Pannem hanging from the ceiling fan. They immediately rushed him to the campus hospital where he was declared brought dead, the sources said.
Siddhardha was a fourth semester student. His was the fourth such case in IIT-G since 2016.
In September last year, a first semester Mechanical Engineering student named Nagashree S.C. was found hanging in her hostel room. The police found that the 18-year-old girl from Karnataka had left behind a note saying she wanted to be a teacher and not an engineer.
Kishore Barua, a 25-year-old contractual employee was found hanging in his room on the IIT-G campus in August last year. Sarkar Intekhab Alam from Murshidabad in West Bengal was found dead similarly in May 2016. He was a post-graduate student.
The first case of unnatural death was reported in 2014 when the body of 19-year-old Tushar Yadav, an Electronics and Communication Engineering student of the institute, was found behind his three-storey hostel building. Investigation by the police revealed that Yadav, from Gurgaon in Haryana, had jumped from the hostel rooftop.
Additional inputs from PTI
(IIT-Guwahati helpline for students in collaboration with Saathi: 8486814024. Suicide prevention helpline: Sanjivini, Society for Mental Health. Telephone: 011-4076 9002, Monday-Saturday.)
