The death of a young employee in India has once again put the spotlight on toxic work culture. Nikhil Somwanshi, a techie who worked for Ola’s artificial intelligence (AI) arm Krutrim, died allegedly by suicide on May 8.
The recent death of a young tech employee in India has raised fresh concerns about the pressures of toxic work culture. NIkhil Somwashi, who was working with Ola’s AI arm, Krutrim, allegedly died by suicide on May 8. This sparked a wider conversation about mental health and workplace stress in the tech industry.
A Reddit user, who claimed to be a coworker of Nikhil Somwashi shared that Nikhil took his own life due to “extreme work pressure.” The user posted under the username ‘Kirigawakazuto’ after two colleagues quit and most of the workload fell on Nikhil. They also described the work environment as especially tough for freshers and called the experience of working with the manager “traumatic.”
Nikhil Somwanshi was a machine learning engineer at Krutrim, the AI unit of Ola, led by Bhavish Aggarwal. According to his LinkedIn profile, he was a fresher who had been with the company since August 2024. He had recently graduated from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, in July 2024.
Nikhil’s profile showed that he had two internships before joining Krutrim. In 2023, he spent three months interning at Kotak Mahindra Bank in Bengaluru. Later, from January to June 2024, he worked as a Natural Language Processing Engineer intern at IISc.
During his internship at IISc, Nikhil Somwanshi worked on a chatbot called Saathi as part of his Master’s thesis. The project was based on large language models (LLM) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Saathi was funded by the Melinda Gates Foundation and involved a collaboration between IISc Bangalore, Oxford Brookes University (UK), Kotak Mahindra Bank, and Akaike Technologies. The chatbot focused on helping users navigate 200 government schemes.
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