There is a heart-wrenching moment in the 2009 blockbuster movie 3 Idiots, when Joy Lobo, a final-year student at the engineering institute, hangs himself because he is late in completing his project and the principal tells him flatly that he will fail to graduate as a result. "I quit," he writes, and chooses death rather than face academic ignominy and the shattering of his dreams for the future.
Last week, three students, aged 16, 17 and 18, who were enrolled at one of the many coaching institutes in Kota in Rajasthan, bailed out of life in similar fashion. Two of them were from Bihar and stayed in adjacent rooms in the same hostel. The other student was from Madhya Pradesh. One was hoping to crack the IIT joint entrance exam (JEE) and the other two wanted to clear the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), the medical entrance exam — tough competitive tests that these coaching centres prepare their students for. They left no suicide note and, hence, no context for why they did what they did.
However, the context is not hard to fathom. Kota, India's coaching hub, is home to a raft of crammer schools, whose USP is that they get their students battle-ready for JEE and NEET. Youngsters come here from all over the country, but chiefly from the small towns of north India, with dreams of getting the passport to a coveted career in engineering or medicine.
The coaching institutes, which on an average charge around Rs 2.5 lakh per annum (food and lodging are extra), put them through the wringer to make them achieve that hallowed goal. Gruelling study schedules, relentless tests and a ferociously competitive environment are focussed on a single-point agenda: cracking the exam that they and their parents have set their hearts on, the exam that will catapult them out of their middle class lives and place them on the road to uncommon opportunities. The Class XII board exams are incidental in this grand scheme. Most of these institutes have arrangements with local schools so the students can skip regular classes there and concentrate instead on their engineering or medical-focused training modules at the coaching centres.
The pressure can be killing. And every year, several students enrolled in Kota's coaching factories do kill themselves, unable to deal with the triple whammy of a brutal study regimen, the burden of parental expectation, and the fear of falling back in the cutthroat competition to stay in the game of readying for a so-called bright future. This year as many as 14 students died by suicide in Kota.
That's a sobering number. And it demonstrates all that is wrong with Kota's dehumanised, conveyor belt system of churning out competitive exam acers, each one of whom is at once an advertisement for its teaching (and business) model and an enticement to more youngsters to come and join the frenetic fray of would-be doctors and engineers.
Whenever a student at a Kota coaching institute dies by suicide, the media and the public wake up anew to the intense academic pressure that these centres subject their pupils to. For a few days, the talk is all about the breakneck competition, the cramped living conditions at the hostels, the loneliness of being far away from home, the need to regulate these institutes, and the issue of too many aspirants and too few seats in prestigious courses.
However, Kota is an extreme distillation, a toxic microcosm, as it were, of a problem that is threatening to become severe in India. Data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) released in August this year, says that the number of students deaths by suicide rose by 4.5 per cent in 2021. Suicide by students accounted for 8 per cent of the total number of such deaths in the country — one of the fastest growing segments. In 2020, as many as 12,526 students died by suicide, while in 2021 the number rose to 13,089.
There could be a variety of reasons that lead students to end their lives — the NCRB cites failure in exams and family problems as factors. The key point, however, is that the mental health of children and teens rarely receives the kind of attention that it deserves. Of course, India has the largest number of suicides in the world, according to a 2021 study by Lancet. But if mental health is a matter that is broadly neglected in this country, perhaps it is neglected even more when it comes to teens.
Barring the fancy schools in the metros, counsellors are a rarity. Barring affluent and vigilant parents, the warning signals in a child's deteriorating mental health may also go unnoticed. An adolescent could be experiencing intolerable parental pressure to excel in studies, shame at poor academic performance, or bullying by classmates. They could be in dysfunctional families that create a sense of insecurity and instability, or may face parental abuse. Any one or a combination of these factors can push a teen or a child over the edge.
The problem of a growing incidence of suicide by children, teens and young adults is not particular to India alone. Research by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in the US, published in April this year, showed that the share of adolescents' death by suicide had grown to 6.5 per cent of all suicides in 2020 — up from 5.9 per cent during the past five years.
China, which, like India, has a high-stress, exam-driven education system, and the same kind of obsession on the part of parents to goad their children to be top academic performers, also sees a large number of students committing suicide every year.
With the number of student suicides soaring in India, there is an urgent need for the government to set up support structures that can monitor the mental health of children and adolescents. A teenager is unlikely to reach for a suicide prevention helpline. He or she needs someone sympathetic and accessible to talk to and confide in, someone who can help walk them out of whatever psychological crisis that is overwhelming them, one who can call for medical help if need be.
When I was a teenager, one of my classmates had an altercation with his father over a proposed school trip out of town. The father didn't give him permission to go on the trip. The boy went into his room, closed the door and hung himself from the ceiling fan.
Is it just one incident that makes children, who are so new to this world, want to exit it? Or is it a long-brewing thing, slowly engulfing them in a perfect storm of stress and despair, until they feel they can bear it no more?
After the three students died by suicide at the Kota institute, The Times of India published interviews with their families. All of them said that the teens seemed perfectly cheerful when they last spoke. That just goes to show how blissfully unaware parents often are about the true state of mind of their offspring.
Hence, it is not enough to insist that the Kota institutes clean up their act and become less of a template for triggering possible psychological meltdowns among pupils. Without a doubt, they must do so. However, the government should also make it mandatory for every school, every academic institution in the country to have a healthy student-teacher ratio and the necessary number of counsellors on board who can observe the telltale signs of fraying mental health in children and young adults, and who can comfort and befriend them, and proactively step in to come to their aid.
Otherwise, India's alarming statistic of rising student suicides will only get worse.
(Shuma Raha is a journalist and author)
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.