Yoga at IIT (India)after suicides

Some of the students at IIT kanpur having difficult time in sleeping. Many students, suffering from nervous tension and depression due to a phobia over water and study load, says Dr Ravindra Podwal, a yoga expert in charge of the centre.

The IIT decided to introduce yoga and naturopathy after several suicides on the campus. “We are asking students to go to the yoga centre because stress is a silent killer,” says director S.G. Dhande. “And initial responses from students have been positive.”

On May 3 this year, a 23-year-old student, Shailesh Sharma, hanged himself in his hostel room. The institute’s authorities had claimed the final-year student of the chemical engineering department may have killed himself after coming to know that he had failed in two courses — advanced thermodynamics and advanced fluid-mechanics.

In October, Swapnil Chandrakant Dharaskar, a second-year mechanical engineering student, committed suicide.

Now, with the authorities making yoga exercises compulsory for new entrants, about 70 students have joined the centre so far. Every day, after classes are over, they practise yoga for at least an hour.

Sources in the institute’s health unit say a study on IIT Kanpur students in the wake of the suicides revealed that a very high percentage suffered from stress and nervous tension. Podwal agrees. “We had organised occasional health camps and found that stress was a common malady.”