The parents of a second-year B.Tech student at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, who tragically died by suicide on Friday, September 18, 2026, have formally accused the institute’s administration of perpetuating deliberate and sustained caste discrimination against their son.

However, the IIT Bombay administration has issued a direct and categorical denial of these allegations. University authorities stated that the deceased student had never raised any grievance regarding bias or ill-treatment during his time on campus, nor had he submitted any formal complaint or distress communication to the institute’s Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (SC/ST) Students and Staff Cell or to the broader administrative leadership.

The student, 20-year-old Sahil Wakode, took the fatal step merely hours after being caught cheating in an ongoing examination. Acting on a formal complaint submitted by his father, Ravindra Wakode, the Mumbai Police on Saturday, September 19, 2026, registered a First Information Report (FIR) naming Professor Suryanarayan Doolla alongside several other unnamed individuals. In addition to severe charges pertaining to the abetment of suicide, the FIR formally invoked stringent non-bailable provisions under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.

According to university accounts, Professor Doolla was actively discharging invigilation duties during the examination when Sahil was detected using a mobile device inside the hall. Administrative officials stated that the student had uploaded the examination paper directly onto the generative artificial intelligence platform ChatGPT to obtain answers. Following the detection of this malpractice, Sahil was instructed to leave the examination hall immediately. A few hours later, he was discovered dead inside his room in the campus hostel.

In their statements to law enforcement officials, the deceased student’s parents maintained that their son had repeatedly informed them about experiencing isolation, unfair hurdles, and systemic hostility across the institute campus. Sahil’s father explicitly alleged in his complaint that Professor Doolla had targeted his son with caste-based derogatory remarks for three continuous months, claiming these actions were carried out under direct instructions from IIT Bombay Director, Professor Shireesh B. Kedare.

Detailing the sequence of events leading up to the tragedy, the father stated in his official complaint:

Responding directly to the serious allegations, Director Shireesh B. Kedare rejected the charges in their entirety, stating that caste discrimination does not exist at IIT Bombay and that no bias was involved in the circumstances surrounding the student's death. Addressing allegations of targeted identification, Kedare explained the operational safeguards governing student profiles:

“And there is absolutely none in this case. In fact, caste-based information of every student is completely hidden and not available for anybody’s information,” Kedare said.

Concurrently, the SC/ST Students and Staff Cell of IIT Bombay confirmed that their office possessed no record of any past or pending complaint from Sahil concerning caste discrimination, academic harassment, or intimidation.

In the immediate wake of the incident, Sahil’s parents initially refused to claim his body from the hospital, demanding immediate punitive measures and an independent inquiry into the faculty members involved. The impasse concluded late Saturday evening only after Mumbai’s Joint Commissioner of Police (Law and Order), Manoj Kumar Sharma, met with the family and confirmed that the investigation was being formally transferred to the Crime Branch. Following these official assurances, the parents accepted the mortal remains to perform his final rites. An investigation team from the Mumbai Police Crime Branch, headed by an Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP)-level officer, is currently conducting the formal probe into the incident.

The news of Sahil Wakode’s death triggered severe unrest across the Powai campus, culminating in massive late-night student demonstrations outside administrative complexes. Online, the incident catalyzed an intense wave of reactions, driven predominantly by Ambedkarite organizations and digital commentators who asserted that General category faculty members and students routinely harass and demean individuals from marginalized backgrounds, driving them to suicide. Demanding immediate legal intervention and systemic accountability, one viral post stated:

Simultaneously, the advocacy handle @AmbedkarCircle_ amplified the late-night student rallies occurring across the IIT Bombay campus, reiterating parental claims of institutional harassment and systemic torture.

Other digital commentators used the incident to aggressively demand strict affirmative action mandates across faculty appointments. They argued that while students admitted to IIT Bombay understand the dynamics of affirmative action, the predominantly unreserved faculty harbored persistent biases that necessitated mandatory faculty reservations.

These digital commentaries rapidly adopted a familiar narrative: contending that campus suicides in elite educational spaces are suffered exclusively by Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) students as a result of upper-caste bias. Commentators openly questioned why General Category students appear immune to identical mental health outcomes in top-tier institutions, establishing a rigid discourse that frequently overlooks broader empirical records.

In Sahil Wakode’s case, the sequence of events began with an examination crisis: a second-year student caught using a smartphone to run ChatGPT during a test, confronted with immediate expulsion from the hall, and reacting with sudden fear and panic. Yet within hours of his death, the tragedy was reframed into an institutional confrontation over caste bias. The invigilator who reported the cheating infraction was booked under the stringent provisions of the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act.

The assertion by the student's father that Professor Suryanarayan Doolla had targeted his son with casteist slurs for three months on instructions from the IIT Director surfaced only after the student's passing. This sharp escalation illustrates how an acute personal crisis, unfolding under immediate academic stress, can quickly be integrated into established sociopolitical narratives.