Mumbai: Four days after second-year BTech student Sahil Wakode’s suicide on campus, IIT-B’s board of governors set up a high-level 10-member committee, which includes students and a former vigilance officer, to probe the circumstances surrounding the death, even as it asked Prof Suryanarayana Doolla, accused of abetment, to go on leave.The panel has been directed to submit its report within a week. “Once the report is submitted and the investigation is complete, a decision will be taken,” said a source.The board also considered the demands placed before it by students and is learnt to have agreed to most of them, barring calls for resignations.The committee will be headed by Prof Ramesh Venkateswaran, chairman of the board of governors at IIT-Palakkad, and includes faculty members, an administrator and a psychiatrist. Among the IIT-Bombay faculty members on the panel are Prof K Narayanan from School of Humanities and Social Sciences; Prof Sandip Kumar Saha from the department of mechanical engineering, who is also convener of the institute’s SC/ST students and staff cell; and Prof Deepti Kalsi, assistant professor in the department of chemistry. Three students have been included: general secretary (hostel affairs) Aditya Joshi, student mentor programme overall coordinator Dev Arora and research scholar Devi Lal. Retired IAS officer Vishwanath Giriraj, former institute vigilance officer Prof K G Suresh from the physics department and psychiatrist Dr Harish Shetty are also members. A senior institute official said the composition of the panel has been shared with the education ministry and its nod is awaited.The developments came on a day when faculty bodies from IITs across the country, including Kharagpur, Kanpur, Hyderabad, Roorkee and Guwahati, and sent messages expressing support for their counterparts at IIT-B and calling for due process. By evening, however, IIT- B Faculty Forum president Prof Ravindra Pant had been instructed in writing not to speak to the media.Around 6pm, students from the department of energy science and engineering also held a peaceful march on campus, seeking justice for Wakode while expressing support for Prof Doolla.Wakode’s father Ravindra Wakode, who arrived in Mumbai, met city crime branch officers and later told reporters that he would begin a hunger strike from Wednesday if IIT-B officials named in the case were not arrested. Ravindra and his wife had last met Wakode on Sept 13—five days before the death—when they spent the day with him on campus before returning to their home in Yavatmal the following day.Earlier, student representatives said they wanted questions arising from Wakode’s death to remain student-led and rooted within the IIT-B community. They cautioned against allowing external political organisations or competing narratives to take over concerns emerging from students’ experiences on campus. In a statement, the students said they neither supported nor condoned cheating “or any form of academic misconduct”. They said the protest was a collective effort to flag systemic concerns that had existed for some time and to seek “meaningful and strong institutional reforms” so that no student would have to face similar circumstances in future.A faculty member raised questions about how Wakode allegedly managed to carry a phone for the exam, saying students were frisked before entering the exam hall. “Guards are posted even outside washrooms and students are frisked after they come out,” said the faculty member. However, students said the checks were not always rigorous. “The frisking is often quite cursory. Sometimes, we keep our phone behind a scientific calculator in our pocket. The guard may simply ask what is inside, and if we say it is a calculator, we are often allowed to pass,” said a student.The institute, meanwhile, announced that exams postponed on Sept 19 and 20 will now be held this Saturday and Sunday.
