A 20-year-old student of BITS Pilani’s Goa campus was found dead in her hostel room on Sunday night in a suspected suicide. This is the sixth death on the institute’s campus in the past 15 months.
A police officer said they were investigating the reasons behind the suspected suicide of the student, who was from Karnataka and was studying Electronics and Communication Engineering. The incident was reported at around 10 pm by college authorities, following which a police team from South Goa reached the spot, the officer said.
In the aftermath of the suicide cases in the institute in September last year, Goa Chief Minister Pramod Sawant announced that a district-level monitoring committee would conduct an inquiry. According to sources, the committee held two meetings on September 5 and September 12, 2025, to ascertain the reasons for the deaths.
In its report, the committee is learnt to have observed that “suicide contagion”, a phenomenon where exposure to a suicide or suicidal behaviour of one or more persons influences others to commit or attempt suicide, could be the reason behind the spurt in such cases on the campus.
A senior official, requesting anonymity, said, “A report has been submitted to senior officials. The committee conducted a probe and examined the five cases. It has been observed that ‘copy-cat’ suicides, where a suicidal act triggers a similar behaviour in others and leads to imitation, could be among the reasons. Only in one case, the parent of a victim flagged that academic stress was the reason.”
According to information shared in last month’s Assembly session, however, the government said five students from BITS Pilani’s Goa campus died by suicide in 2024 and 2025, with academic stress during examination time being cited as the prime reason for most of the deaths. In response to a question on the number of suicides and whether the cases are linked to academic pressures, the Home Department had said that all five unnatural death cases till then had “occurred during the exam periods” and that the cases were under investigation. It recorded that in four of those cases, the reason for suicide was “stress over exams”, while the fifth case of suicide occurred due to a personal issue, wherein “the deceased was in depression” after his partner died by suicide.
After the district-level monitoring committee made suggestions to curb such incidents, officials said, college authorities implemented some measures, including streamlining academic content, expanding counselling services with professional psychologists, setting up a 24×7 helpline, scheduling sessions with the faculty to address students’ concerns, and providing weekly psychiatrist consultations.
A spokesperson for BITS Goa did not respond to requests for a comment.
Meanwhile, the Goa Pradesh Congress Committee (GPCC) demanded a judicial inquiry into students’ deaths at the college campus since December 2024.
GPCC president Amit Patkar said, “The tragic discovery of yet another student found dead…is a damning indictment of the total collapse of student safety, mental-health governance, and administrative responsibility in the state of Goa.”
