India’s Student Suicide Rate Explained
Where are we going wrong?
A 16 year-old student preparing for the coveted NEET exam in Kota, committed suicide on September 18, 2023. After consuming poison Priyas was taken to the hospital by her friends, where she succumbed to her death after three hours. This was the 25th student suicide in India this year.
Priyas hailed from Uttar Pradesh, India and was preparing for the annual medical entrance exam that would decide the fate of thousands who want to pursue a medical degree.
The infamous city of Kota is the National hub of study coaching centers that train millions of students to prepare for Engineering and Medical college entrance exams each year. It is also a multi-million dollar industry of it’s own.
It is also now the Student Suicide city of the country.
Data on Student Suicides in India
The Union Minister of State for Education reported that 98 students have died due to suicide in higher institutions of education in the last five years.
What the Minister didn’t mention was that majority of these suicides were of students from minority communities, tribes and ‘backward classes’.
India follows a model of admission wherein General, Schedules Castes, and Schedules Tribe categories are used to admit students. This provides minorities a fair chance for admission.
However, it’s the life after entering college that we forget to look at.
Racial and caste-based discrimination doesn’t just stop at admission. One ought to form protection commissions within the college to take care that minority students are not being harassed, mentally or physically.
Even though each institution has formed such committees, students very rarely approach them for help. And how could they?
The Wire reports that faculty members also constantly voiced their sentiments against the reservation for minority students. Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi — the most coveted institute in the country — just witnessed two Dalit student suicides in a span of one month.
The Dalit caste forms the lowest rung of the rigid caste system in India. One of the students who died had failed some subjects and the discrimination pushed them over the edge.
Faculty members are mostly members of the upper caste and are of the opinion that the system of admissions for minorities is anti-merit.
But what about students who are yet to enter university?
Kota is the hub of students studying day and night to get into the prestigious engineering universities of the country.
The scarring left by the coaching institutes, parents and self-infliction during their growing years is carried throughout their lives.
But it also explains the youngest suicide statistics of the country.
Kriti Tripathy was one such student who committed suicide the day after clearing the IIT-JEE exam of engineering. She got in and that pushed her to the limit.
She refers to parental pressure that most Kota students experience in her suicide note:
“You manipulated me as a kid to like science…I took science to make you happy…I had interest in astrophysics and quantum physics and would have done a BSc.”
She went on to warn her mother not to manipulate her sister with the same expectations.
Anand Sagar’s research suggests that the fear of failure, and the burden of family pressure to achieve is more than children can take. Even getting into a good college does not ensure their mental wellbeing.
In case you want to know the administration steps towards the rising cases of student suicides by hanging — it was putting an anti-suicide device on all ceiling fans in the city. I’m not joking.
