16-yr-old girl kills self, 13th suicide this year

KOTA: A 16-year-old girl preparing for NEET allegedly committed suicide on Tuesday by hanging from a ceiling fan in her hostel room at Kunhadi area in India’s coaching hub of Kota, taking the number of students committing suicide this year to 13. In 2017, seven students had committed suicide.

This is the second such suicide in Kota in the last two days.

Police said that the student, Sakshi Maratha — hailing from Buldhana region of Maharashtra — had came to Kota in April for coaching and was enrolled in Allen Career Coaching Institute.

Assistant sub-inspector Dharampal Singh said the private hostel management told police that after the girl did not come out for breakfast and lunch on Tuesday and did not go to attend her coaching classes, the hostel warden went to her room only to find Sakshi hanging from the fan.

No suicide note was found from the room, he said.

Sakshi’s family was informed about the incident and the postmortem would be done on arrival of her parents.

On Sunday night, 15-year-old Devesh Kumar, an IIT-JEE aspirant from Bihar, committed suicide by hanging himself from a rod tied to the legs of a bed put in vertical position in Kota’s Vigyan Nagar.

More than 1.50 lakh students arrive in Kota every year from different parts of the country to prepare for medical and engineering entrance examinations.

Suicides by students had witnessed a fall in 2017 before a spike in 2015 and 2016 forced the district administration to implement several measures, including mandatory counselling of students and installing alarms in fans.

Between 2013 and 2017, 58 students taking coaching in Kota committed suicide, as per the data complied by the district administration.