UC Berkeley student's death spotlights mental health toll on Indian scholars abroad

The recovery of 22-year-old Saketh Sreenivasaiah's body from Lake Anza closed a five-day search that drew in Berkeley Police, East Bay Regional Park District divers and the Indian consulate in San Francisco. Coverage from South Asian outlets has moved from search bulletins to reflections from his roommate and to renewed concern about mental health among Indian international students. Fellow scholars, IIT Madras classmates and Karnataka officials have all joined the response.

Roommate remembers Saketh: the opposite of life was indifference

NextShark reports that Saketh Sreenivasaiah, a 22-year-old chemical and biomolecular engineering master's student from Karnataka, was found dead in Lake Anza at Tilden Regional Park on February 14, days after being reported missing near UC Berkeley. He had completed his undergraduate degree at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras before enrolling at Berkeley. Alameda County Sheriff's Office dive teams recovered his body from the lake, about a twelve-minute drive from campus, and the Contra Costa County Coroner's Office confirmed his identity two days later. Authorities said Sreenivasaiah had been distressed over a relationship in the weeks before he disappeared. His roommate, Baneet Singh, wrote on LinkedIn that in the two weeks leading up to the disappearance Sreenivasaiah had started eating less and engaging less, surviving mostly on chips and cookies, warning signs he now says he missed. Singh recalled a final exchange in which his friend, wrapped in a red bathrobe after class, said he had stopped caring. At the time Singh took it as banter; in hindsight he wrote that the opposite of life was never death, but indifference. Singh, who called international student life tough, is working with authorities to bring the family from India on an emergency visa. The report also cites 2024 research finding suicide is now the leading cause of death among AAPI youth. [2]

🗳️ San Francisco consulate coordinates with Berkeley Police on East Bay search

Gulf News reported from Washington that the Consulate General of India in San Francisco publicly stepped into Saketh Sreenivasaiah's disappearance, saying in a statement on X that it was deeply concerned about the 22-year-old UC Berkeley postgraduate from Karnataka. The consulate said its officers were in touch with the student's family in India and had opened lines with the local authorities coordinating the search in the East Bay. Berkeley Police told the outlet that Sreenivasaiah, reportedly upset about a relationship, was last seen in the 1700 block of Dwight Way near McGee Avenue on the Tuesday of that week, and that his backpack containing his passport and laptop was later found on a doorstep in the Park Hills neighbourhood beside Tilden Regional Park. Officers said they were working with the East Bay Regional Park District to coordinate search efforts and that a search was underway near Lake Anza. The report described the student as six feet one inch tall, roughly 160 pounds, with short black hair and brown eyes, and quoted police identifying him as Indian. The consulate's involvement is consistent with the mission's practice of shadowing serious incidents involving Indian nationals in its jurisdiction; Gulf News, which syndicated the story from IANS, linked the case to other recent tragedies involving Indian students in California and Texas as it followed the search updates. [4]

Karnataka to Berkeley: profile of the missing chemical engineering student

WION profiled Saketh Sreenivasaiah as the search for him entered its fifth day on Saturday, February 14. The Karnataka-born 22-year-old was pursuing a master's degree in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley when he went missing earlier that week, and was last seen roughly a kilometre from campus on February 10, according to the Berkeley Police Department. The outlet emphasised the consulate's early response, quoting a statement from the Consulate General of India in San Francisco on X in which the consulate said it was deeply concerned about the disappearance of Saketh Sreenivasaiah, an Indian post-graduate student of UC Berkeley from the State of Karnataka, and confirmed it was in touch with the family and with the concerned local authorities to locate the student. WION's profile added that Sreenivasaiah had arrived in the United States on a competitive engineering track after his undergraduate years at an Indian technical institute, and that his family was closely following the search from home. The dispatch, edited by Prajvi Mathur and published on February 14, framed the disappearance as another case that Indian mission officials in the United States have had to shadow in recent months, and encouraged anyone with information near the Berkeley campus to contact local police. [7]

Sources: [2] nextshark.com · [4] Gulf News · [7] WION