I quit: PhD scholar hangs herself at IIT-Gn

I quit: PhD scholar hangs herself at IIT-Gn

Officials Remain Tight-Lipped

Ashish.Chauhan & Parth.Shastri TNN

Ahmedabad:11.07.2020

The suicide of a 32-year-old research scholar at the IIT Gandhinagar (IIT-Gn) campus on July 6 sent a shockwave through the education corridors of the state capital. The victim, Piue Ghosh, who was from of West Bengal, left a moving ‘I Quit’ on the wall of her residence. Gandhinagar police are yet to ascertain the reason behind her extreme step.

IIT-Gn officials remained tight-lipped about the incident and attempts to reach Prof Sudhir Jain, the institute director, through phone and email yielded no results. A statement from the IIT-Gn public relations team read, “The incident is currently under investigation by police and the institute is committed to fully cooperating with them. We are unable to release any information or comment while the investigation is under way.”

The response identified Ghosh as a PhD scholar at the electric engineering department of the institute.

M H Solanki, the sub-inspector with Chiloda police station who is investigating the case, told TOI that Ghosh had hanged herself at her quarters on the campus.

“She had written ‘I quit’ and a few more lines on a wall, directing that her belongings be given to the needy and her organs donated,” he said. “Apart from this writing on the wall, no note on paper in digital format has been found that could be considered a suicide note,” he added.

Solanki said the statements of her family and faculty members are yet to be recorded. “Her parents are based in West Bengal and her husband is in the US,” he said.

Sources privy to the developments said Ghosh had returned to the campus from her parents’ home only recently. Due to the lockdown and subsequent online classes, only a few students are living on the campus. They added that her postmortem report is yet to arrive through which the precise time of death could be known.

“It is possible that her suicide occurred a couple of days before the body was found,” a police source said.

Ghosh’s profile on the IITGn website identifies her as doctoral student writing her thesis on the subject ‘Synthesis of gold nanorods with tunable surface plasmon resonance for the development of a bio-chemical sensing platform’ under Prof Arup Lal Chakraborty.

Her project aimed at designing a biomolecular sensor for simultaneous detection of multiple biomolecules. She had completed her BTech and MTech from Calcutta University before taking admission in IIT-Gn for its doctoral programme in 2015. Posts on IIT-Gn’s social media pages announced several of her academic achievements.