Not only excel but also flourish: IIT-Kgp to teach ‘Life Skills’
Times of India | 9 November 2025
Kolkata: IIT Kharagpur is set to roll out two courses — ‘Life Skills' and ‘Joy & Success' — for its students in the backdrop of a spate of suicides on the campus this year. The ‘Life Skills' course will be compulsory for first-year students but ‘Joy and Success' will be an elective course for seniors.
The IIT-Kgp management hopes these courses will equip students with the emotional intelligence and psychological resilience necessary to flourish.
Both the courses will tentatively be introduced around Jan 2026 after Senate's approval.
"Through these pioneering courses we are empowering our students not just to excel, but to flourish, build resilience, empathy and meaning alongside academic brilliance.
These programs reflect our conviction that the future will belong not only to the most intelligent minds, but to the most emotionally grounded and socially connected human beings," said director Suman Chakraborty.
The premiere institute has witnessed five suicides in the last nine months. When an external expert committee interacted with the students, more than 80% said parental expectations and pressure to secure good internships and placements led to stress.
The experts also suggested that since students nowadays are dependent on gadgets and social media plays a huge role in their upbringing, there is a need to introduce life-skill programmes and courses like socio-emotional learning, emotional resilience in the curriculum.
A senior professor said, "We have seen students taking drastic steps after failing to secure good internships or grades. They remain anxious about peer and parental pressure, academic stress and relationship challenges.
Since both these courses integrate modern behavioural science with principles of gratitude, purpose and mindfulness, it will help them develop inner strength, learn how to manage stress, accept setbacks in life and overcome self-doubt."
The mandatory ‘Life Skills' course for all first-year students is aimed at equipping freshers with necessary social, emotional and practical skills to navigate the campus confidently and compassionately, said officials.
"Transitioning into a rigorous academic environment can be both exciting and overwhelming for new students. The course will focus on emotional literacy, self-awareness and resilience, and will help students to handle peer pressure, homesickness, relationship issues and academic stress," an official said.
The 12-week course is activity-based and will be facilitated by experts, alumni and trained senior students."
The highly-interactive elective ‘Joy & Success' course for senior students has been framed to help students understand themselves, build positive habits and cultivate success through scientifically proven strategies of happiness and emotional growth. The course was piloted on Saturday among 50 students to seek their feedback. Some of the core modules of the course are habits, happiness & success, aspiration & awareness, reframing failure & managing emotion, building social capital, gratitude & positive emotion and designing life around joy.
An official said, "The course follows an experiential structure with 10 sessions of two-and-a-half hours each, blending short lectures, peer discussion, presentations and activities like reflective journaling, gratitude practice, community play sessions and ensures learning without competition."