KANPUR, March 25 -- Struggling to contain a spate of suicides by hanging on its campus, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, has begun removing embedded pipes used by students to dry clothes from hostel rooms and installing spring-loaded devices in ceiling fans.

These devices are specially designed to trigger an alarm and automatically lower the fan's height if the weight applied to it exceeds a certain limit, a mechanism intended to prevent students from using the fixtures to harm themselves.

The pipes, fixed to walls, are being removed from halls 1 to 3, older hostel buildings, which have nearly 1,500 rooms in total. The spring-loaded devices will be installed in every ceiling fan across all 14 hostels of the institute. ...