New Delhi: After a midnight march by IIT Delhi students Thursday as part of their ongoing protest following a postgraduate scholar’s death on the premises, director Rangan Banerjee sent a mail to all students around 5pm Friday, stating that the institute will take disciplinary actions against individuals disrupting the peaceful functioning of the campus, including residential areas, classes, academic and other activities. Around Thursday midnight, protesting IIT Delhi students marched through the campus, calling on faculty members to come out and stand with them in solidarity. “Professors bahar aao, aao hamara saath do (professors, come out and stand with us),” students chanted. Referring to the incident, Banerjee wrote in the email, “Unfortunately, the situation escalated significantly on the night of Thursday. On that night, from 10.30pm to 12.30am, a group of protesters extended their agitation into the campus residential zones, staging demonstrations directly in front of faculty housing and resorting to unsavoury, humiliating and threatening language in their slogans.” He added, “Such behaviour compromises the safety, privacy and peace of faculty members and their families, including young children and elderly dependents.“The mail also listed out the measures taken. “We had committed to a set of specific steps based on discussions with the student representatives and other students. The external inquiry committee has started functioning. The institute’s support for the family from the benevolent fund has been approved and the separate fund with voluntary contributions from faculty, students and staff has been created. The external ombudsperson will be appointed next week,” the director wrote, adding that IIT has “continued to engage with our student representatives and other students in good faith”. Referring to the mail, a student said, “Disciplinary action means we won’t be able to sit for placement drives. This mail has been sent to kill the movement. I don’t think students will turn up in huge numbers now.” Earlier in the day, in a video shared on IIT Delhi’s official social media handle, Banerjee acknowledged that the measures currently in place to support students were “not enough” and called for different approaches to rebuild trust with students. “This incident is a wake-up call for everyone and we have scaled up our counselling and created an academic group, but clearly whatever we are doing is not enough. We need different approaches. We need to work together with our students.”The director said he had spent a “reasonable amount of time” with students on the first day of the protest to understand the issues. “We are committed to making changes so that our system improves,” he said. IIT Delhi also reiterated the measures it has taken, stating student well-being remained an “absolute priority”. According to it, students have round-the-clock access to mental-health services through counsellors, along with psychiatric support. Mechanisms are also in place for emergency intervention and referral for specialised care, when required. The institute has also cited mentorship and peer-support initiatives intended to give students multiple avenues to seek assistance.On the academic front, IIT said measures introduced in recent years included a lighter first-semester credit load, life-skills courses and smaller first-year departmental classes, capped at 30-60 students. Weekend examinations have been minimised and flexibility maintained in credit distribution, it said. The institute added that the minimum CGPA requirement for obtaining a BTech degree was removed from the 2024-25 academic year.IIT Delhi said its grievance-redressal framework included a centralised ERP-based system for tracking complaints, besides institutional mechanisms such as Board for Student Welfare, SC/ST and OBC cells, hostel wardens and confidential counselling channels. Students, however, have questioned how effectively these mechanisms translate into action on the ground, arguing that several measures announced in the past have not resulted in visible change.
