The grieving family of a medical aspirant who was found hanging in his hostel room here has appealed to the Rajasthan government to address the issue of student suicides in the coaching hub which has reported nine such deaths since January.

“It is a slap on the state government’s face that we leave our children in Kota to study but take back their bodies,” said the 17-year-old NEET aspirant’s uncle Rajiv Yadav, who spoke to reporters outside a mortuary.

Harshraj Shankar, a native of Bihar’s Nalanda district, was found hanging from an iron rod inside his hostel room in Jawahar Nagar on Tuesday, the police said.

The body was discovered by the police who were called by the hostel caretaker after Shankar did not respond to repeated knocking on the door.

No suicide note was recovered from the spot. However, according to the caretaker, “Sorry” was found written on the book shelf rack.

The boy had been preparing for the medical entrance exam in a coaching institute here since April last year, they said.

The boy’s father, uncle and some family members reached Kota on Wednesday to claim the body after a post-mortem.

“The government should address the issue. (CM) Sharmaji’s government should ensure that no such tragedy happens in future,” the uncle said.

“Our boy was good at studies and had been taking coaching in Kota to crack NEET,” he said.

The police said they have lodged an FIR section 194 of Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita and launched a probe.

Meanwhile, hostel caretaker Lokesh Sharma said the boy lived in the hostel with three of his cousins.

All four of them cooked and ate noodles in Shankar’s room late Monday night. He was strolling in the hostel till 9 pm and showed no signs of distress, said Sharma who has undergone ‘Gate Keeper Training’, designed by district administration to train hostel management in identification of suspicious or abnormal behaviour in the students and providing timely assistance and counselling.

After checking into the hostel in April, the boy got an iron rod fixed inside his room to exercise pull-ups, the caretaker said.

Since the fans in the hostel room were equipped with “anti-suicide devise”, the boy used the iron rod to hang himself, he said.

This is the ninth student suicide this year that took place in the city famous for its being a coaching hub. Six coaching students — five JEE, one NEET — killed themselves in January alone.

Seventeen coaching students died by suicide in Kota in 2024. In 2023, the number stood at 26.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)