IITs have earned their reputation through a demanding academic environment, intellectual rigour and high standards. That rigour must remain at the heart of an IIT education. The objective is not to reduce the level of competition or dilute academic expectations, but to help students develop the resilience, maturity and life skills needed to perform and thrive within such an environment.
What struck most in the system is how differently the pressure lands depending on where a student comes from. A topper from a metro city, armed with English-medium schooling, coaching-institute polish, and parents who themselves work in engineering or academia, arrives already fluent in the unwritten rules of this world. A student from a small town in Bihar or rural Andhra Pradesh, the first in his family to leave the district, arrives fluent in something else entirely — sacrifice, expectation, and the unbearable weight of being his family’s one shot at a different life.
Both students walk into the same lecture hall. Only one of them has ever heard the phrase “relative grading” before. Only one of them can call home and be understood when he says he’s struggling. The other has to translate his pain into a language, literal and emotional, that his parents were never given the tools to receive. This is the part outsiders miss when they write about “IIT stress” as if it were one uniform thing. It is not. There are dozens of different pressures wearing the same uniform.
When “Just Getting In” Was the Whole Plan
For many students, especially those from smaller towns, the years before cracking the entrance is treated as the entire mission — the studying, the coaching factories, the family’s collective anxiety compressed into a single number. Nobody prepares them for what comes after the mission is accomplished: that at IIT, everyone was once “the topper,” and by definition, half the class will now be below average. For a student whose entire identity has been built on academic rank, this can feel like an identity collapse, not just an academic adjustment.
Add to this the placement culture — where a student’s worth gets quietly, brutally re-priced every semester by the size of the package their friends are getting — and you have an environment that rewards constant comparison and punishes any admission of struggle as weakness.
What Isn’t Working
Most IITs today do have counselling cells, wellness committees, and student-run mental health initiatives. I don’t want to dismiss the genuine effort behind them. But having seen these systems from the inside at two different institutes, I can say plainly: they are under-resourced, understaffed, and often structurally mismatched to the students they’re meant to serve.
A single counsellor for thousands of students cannot possibly hold the caseload. A counsellor who doesn’t speak Bhojpuri, Telugu, or Odia cannot fully reach a homesick student for whom English itself is one more performance to keep up. And a culture where seeking help is still quietly read as “not IIT material” will keep students walking past the counselling cell’s door rather than through it, no matter how good the counsellor inside might be.
What Could Actually Change This, If I could rewrite the playbook, here is where I would start:
Make mental health infrastructure proportional to the problem, not symbolic: One counsellor per few thousand students is not a mental health system — it’s a gesture. IITs need counselling teams sized and funded like the crisis demands, including professionals who reflect the linguistic and regional diversity of the student body.
Build peer-support structures with teeth, not just posters: Senior-junior mentorship exists on paper at most IITs; it needs to be trained, funded, and treated as seriously as academic advising — because a struggling first-year is far more likely to open up to a second-year from their own state than to an institutional office.
Rethink evaluation culture, not just support services: No amount of counselling will offset a system that grades on a curve and treats every setback as public information via CGPA. Institutes should experiment with pass/fail options for elective exploration, wider grace periods for students in genuine distress, and academic advisors empowered to actually adjust course loads rather than just sympathise.
Bring families into the orientation, not just the students: Many parents — proud, loving, and utterly unequipped — do not know what their child is going through because no one has ever told them what IIT life actually looks like. A short, honest orientation for parents on the realities of academic pressure, told without shame, could change how a struggling student is received at home.
Normalizing failure publicly, not just in pamphlets: Alumni, faculty, and even directors sharing their own struggles — failed courses, breakdowns, dropped semesters — does more to dismantle stigma than any wellness week banner. I remember how much it meant, as a student, the one time a professor admitted he had once considered dropping out. A student should be able to receive a poor grade, miss an opportunity or face rejection without feeling that their entire future has collapsed. Education should teach students not only how to succeed, but also how to respond constructively when things do not go according to plan. Learning to handle failure, recover from setbacks and move forward is itself an important part of education.
Treat placement anxiety as a mental health issue in its own right: Career counselling shouldn’t begin in the pre-placement season; it should begin in the first year, helping students separate their self-worth from a recruiter’s shortlist long before the pressure peaks.
A Different Kind of Exceptional Culture
The IIT experience can therefore become an opportunity to develop the whole individual: a technically accomplished engineer or scientist who is also capable of managing pressure, working collaboratively, dealing with uncertainty and learning from setbacks. As IITs continue to contribute to India’s scientific and technological future, their responsibility can extend beyond producing high-performing graduates. They have an opportunity to demonstrate what a modern, rigorous and humane education system can look like—one that maintains the highest academic standards while also preparing young people for the pressures and uncertainties of life beyond the classroom.
The IITs have spent decades optimising for one kind of excellence — the kind that shows up in rankings, placement statistics, and cutoffs. It is time they optimised, with the same seriousness, for the kind that doesn’t show up in any brochure: whether a student from Motihari and a student from Chennai can both walk across the same campus and feel like they belong there, whole.
