Statistically Important

Nitin Kumar Reddy, 22, student of IIT Madras, committed suicide. He decided to take the extreme step after he came to know that he had failed. (Read details)

As usual the blame game started. The family protested. Staged a dharna. A police case was registered. Life moves on...

What was interesting was the statement by the dean of students. Govardhan M said:

Why are you always reporting negative news about IIT Madras? We also have the maximum number of patents but you didn't report that. But you would want to report the death of 3 out of 5000 students which is statistically not important. Why don't you go to other engineering institutes and find out how many died there. Why only IIT?

Several people protested the insensitive comments. Blogs were written...

Incidentally, Mr. Govardhan was lying. 3 out of 5,000 means 60 out of 100,000. India's overall suicide rate is 10.3 out of 100,000.

This is statistically important.

And speaking of patents, CII awarded IIT Madras for highest number of patents in last five year for any Indian University. The number of patents being 78. There are around 1500 faculties at IIT-Madras.

In contrast, BHEL got 240 patents. TATA steel 103 patents. An individual, Lalit Mahajan notched 23 patents all alone. (To be fair - he was an IIT-M alumnus).

Internationally IBM got 5000 patents in 2010 alone!

The patent claim is statistically insignificant.