New Delhi: Taking a note of increasing number of suicides at educational institutions, the Supreme Court on Monday formed a task force to strengthen the mechanism for the protection of students on campuses, reports claimed.
A bench of justices JB Pardiwala and R Mahadevan referred to deaths of students in college hostels due to sexual harassment, ragging, caste discrimination, etc over the last two months and said they were not isolated incidents, reported the Hindustan Times. “We deem it necessary to discuss the pattern of students’ suicide…What disturbs us even more is that…[they] are not isolated incidents..,” the bench observed.
The task force would be formed under former Supreme Court judge S Ravindra Bhat. The top court ordered the task force to submit a report in four months identifying the causes of student suicides and proposing steps to prevent such incidents. The committee would also include secretaries of the departments of higher education, social justice, women and child development, and legal affairs.
According to reports, this order came at a time when the court was hearing a petition of parents of two students, who allegedly died by suicide at a hostel in Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in 2023. The plea demanded an investigation into the deaths alleging harassment.
The parents moved the court after the police closed the case. The court said the closure was erroneous. “If there are allegations and parents feel children were harassed, it was the duty of the police to register [a] FIR [First Information Report]. To close the proceedings on the basis of inquest proceedings was not enough,” the court observed, as quoted by Hindustan Times.
