Indian student found dead in US; 5th case this year
A 23-year-old Indian-origin student named Sameer Kamath was found dead at Crow's Grove Nature Preserve in Indiana on Monday evening, the Warren County Coroner's office reported. He was pursuing a doctoral degree at Purdue University's Mechanical Engineering Department. His death marks the second Indian-origin student death at Purdue University after Neel Acharya and the fifth in the United States (US) this year.
Kamath was a US citizen
Kamath, who had earned a master's degree in the same department from Purdue in August 2023, was set to complete his doctoral program in 2025. The coroner's office stated that Kamath was a US citizen. The Warren County Coroner's Office and the Sheriff's Office are investigating Kamath's death. An autopsy was set for Tuesday afternoon (local time) in Crawfordsville.
Challenges faced by Indian students in the US
Like Kamath, Acharya was pursuing a double major in computer science and data science at Purdue University. Acharya's demise followed the murder of another student Vivek Saini. He was allegedly hammered to death by a homeless drug addict in Georgia. In a separate case, 19-year-old Shreyas Reddy was found dead in Ohio. While, on January 20, an 18-year-old Indian-American student, Akul B Dhawan, at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was found dead with signs of hypothermia.
Canada has most student deaths among 34 nations
These occurrences have brought attention to the challenges experienced by the Indian student community in the US, which numbers over 3,00,000. Mental stress, loneliness, and substance abuse are recognized as some of the contributing factors to such instances. Last December, the government said that at least 403 Indian students have died overseas since 2018. Canada had the most deaths among the 34 nations, followed by the United Kingdom (48), Russia (40), the US (36), and Australia (35), among others.
