When "No Punishment" Isn't the Same as "Duty of Care"

The Ethical Gap Between "We Didn't Punish Him" and "We Took Care of Him"

Imagine you are the Head of Department. A second-year student has just been caught uploading an exam paper to ChatGPT - a clear act of malpractice. You have two things you could do. You could initiate disciplinary proceedings, as the rules technically allow.

Or you could sit him down, tell him this will not follow him and send him home. You choose the second, the more humane-sounding option. Hours later, he is dead. This is the actual dilemma IIT Bombay's administration now sits inside, whether or not it intended to.

The institute did not choose cruelty - it chose leniency, proportionality, even kindness by its own account. And the outcome was still tragic. That should unsettle anyone reaching for an easy verdict here, because the easy verdict - "the institute should have been kinder"

• is precisely what the institute believed it was already doing. The real question this case raises is narrower and harder: is verbal reassurance, delivered once, in a single meeting, an adequate discharge of an institution's duty of care toward a student in acute distress? Duty of care in a high-stress residential campus cannot be treated as a single transactional act - a conversation, a promise, a return to the hostel room, case closed. A 19-year-old caught cheating in front of his instructor and department head is not just facing an academic consequence; he is facing acute, immediate shame, in an environment already documented for intense academic pressure. Reassurance about "career impact" answers a logistical fear. It does nothing to address the psychological one, which is usually the more dangerous fear in that moment. This is where academic integrity enforcement and duty of care actually collide and it is not a collision either side "wins." Strict punishment risks compounding shame with formal consequence. But leniency without a genuine psychological safety net - a counsellor present, a wellness check that evening, a friend or mentor tasked with staying with him - risks mistaking the absence of punishment for the presence of care. IIT Bombay avoided the first failure. The tragedy suggests it may not have avoided the second. For an aspirant, the lesson isn't "administrations should be harsher" or "administrations should be softer." It's that proportionality in the punishment decided is not the same thing as adequacy in the care delivered - an institution can get the first exactly right and still fail the second completely, because they are answering two different questions.