India’s student-suicide crisis exposes gaps in institutional support, prompting calls to move beyond reactive counselling towards systems that address distress, exclusion, discrimination and belonging.
What if student suicide is not only a mental health crisis, but an institutional crisis?
Behind every suicide is a student navigating pressures that extend beyond the individual, from academic competition and financial insecurity to discrimination, exclusion, and the absence of meaningful support. When institutions respond only after a crisis, they overlook the conditions that produce distress in the first place. Preventing suicide therefore requires more than counselling; it demands institutions that actively address exclusion, build systems of care, and make belonging, dignity, and mental health a collective responsibility.
The Supreme Court itself has recognized this. In 2025, while hearing a case arising from the deaths of two IIT Delhi students, the Court noted the disturbing rise in student suicides and constituted a National Task Force on the mental health of students and prevention of suicides in higher educational institutions, chaired by former Supreme Court judge Justice S. Ravindra Bhat.
The Court emphasised that educational institutions carry a legal and moral responsibility towards the safety and well-being of their students. The Task Force’s findings have made the problem harder to dismiss as a collection of individual tragedies. The Supreme Court has also directed higher educational institutions to report suicides and unnatural deaths, including those occurring outside campus, and has called for round-the-clock access to qualified medical assistance for residential institutions.
Nowhere is the contradiction between institutional excellence and human vulnerability more stark than at the Indian Institutes of Technology. In August 2026, 31-year-old MSc Physics student Rishikesh Kumar died by suicide at IIT Delhi. Rishikesh’s death was not an isolated incident. IIT Delhi has recorded eight student suicides since 2023. Seven students had died before Rishikesh: among them were Ayush Ashna and Anil Kumar in 2023, Kumar Yash in 2024, Ayush Singhal in 2025, and Harshit Swami in March 2026. The cases have involved recurring concerns around academic pressure, examination failures, depression, isolation, and the institutional environment.
In 2023, the deaths of Ayush Ashna and Anil Kumar became the subject of a Supreme Court case. Their families alleged caste-based discrimination and sought proper criminal investigation. The Supreme Court directed the registration of FIRs and used the case to ask what was happening to students across India’s higher education system. What happens in an institution before a student reaches the point of crisis? In 2025, an IIT Delhi committee examining the institutional environment identified post-coaching burnout, a grading system that reinforced toxic competitiveness, relentless academic demands, and concerns relating to caste- and gender-based discrimination. Yet questions remain over the extent to which its recommendations have translated into structural change. It is easier to build a counselling centre than to examine the culture that makes a student afraid to enter it. It is easier to appoint a psychologist than to ask whether a professor knows how to recognise distress.
India’s National Mental Health Policy (NMHP), 2014, already contains the seeds of a broader vision. It does not define mental health merely through the absence of mental illness. Its stated goals include reducing distress, disability, exclusion, and premature mortality; expanding access for vulnerable groups; and addressing the bio-psycho-social determinants of mental health. Despite having frameworks such as the NMHP, the distance between policy and the lived reality of suffering continues to increase. The Mental Healthcare Act (MHCA), 2017, established a right to access mental healthcare and required services to be accessible without discrimination on grounds including gender, sex, sexual orientation, religion, culture, caste, class, and disability. It explicitly provides that mental illness cannot be determined merely on the basis of a person’s political, economic, or social status.
Yet much of statutory mental healthcare still begins when distress has already become legible as clinical illness. There is a vast space between being well and being clinically unwell, a space where students struggle with grief, fear, humiliation, loneliness, financial insecurity, and discrimination. A person can be drowning long before they meet the diagnostic threshold for a disorder, yet our systems routinely wait for the drowning.
The scale of India’s treatment gap makes this especially tragic. The National Mental Health Survey (2015–2016) found an overall treatment gap for mental morbidity of about 84.5%, with higher prevalence among lower-income households and urban metropolitan areas. The Economic Survey has since reiterated that 10.6% of Indian adults live with a mental disorder, alongside growing concerns around adolescent well-being. But these statistics tell only part of the story. They measure what can be quantified; they do not count the student who stops attending class because entering the room has become unbearable, or the student who goes silent after experiencing systemic discrimination.
“India’s student-suicide crisis is not merely a crisis of individual mental illness; it is a crisis of institutions, relationships and belonging,” says Uma Chatterjee, Co-founder and Director of Sanjog, a Kolkata-based, systems-thinking social impact and civil society organisation.
“While the National Mental Health Policy (2014) and Mental Healthcare Act (2017) established important rights and frameworks, India’s response remains largely reactive, too often beginning when distress has already become a clinical crisis.”
“The growing recognition by the Supreme Court and its National Task Force marks an important shift towards institutional accountability, but the deeper challenge is to transform the cultures of competition, exclusion, discrimination and silence that produce distress. India now needs to move from compliance to inclusion, from preventing death to creating educational institutions where dignity, belonging, care and the right to struggle are integral to mental health,” Chatterjee adds.
Taking lived experience seriously requires leveraging opportunities like the forthcoming National Mental Health Survey 2 (NMHS-2). Covering all States and Union Territories and including adolescents, NMHS-2 aims to examine socioeconomic impacts, pathways to care, and vulnerable populations. Its findings must inform the reform of the MHCA 2017 and broader policy, ensuring the institutional imagination extends beyond clinically diagnosed illness to earlier forms of psychological distress.
Urgent policy imperatives include:
- Early Spectrum Response: NMHS-2 must be used to identify and respond to the full spectrum of distress long before it escalates into a clinical crisis. Early distress must become a legitimate site of institutional attention.
- Inter-Ministerial Safeguards: Psychosocial safeguards must be integrated into existing welfare schemes across the Ministries of Social Justice, Labour, and Women and Child Development. If poverty, violence, and social exclusion affect mental well-being, mental health policy cannot remain confined to the Ministry of Health.
- Community Infrastructure: Investment in Community-Based Rehabilitation and local mental health infrastructure must increase. Frontline workers, including ASHA workers and self-help groups, should be resourced to form an early-support ecosystem without being overburdened.
The student suicide crisis sits within a fundamental constitutional question: what does the right to life mean inside an educational institution? Article 21 cannot begin at the hospital door. It must begin much earlier, with the right to learn without humiliation, to fail without being written off, to ask for help without being marked as weak, and to belong without having to erase one’s identity. Ultimately, protecting mental health means making life within our institutions livable.
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Riddhi Bhattacharya is a lawyer and researcher working on human rights and social inclusion. Her work with Sanjog largely focuses on legal and policy reform relating to various human rights issues, mental health, and the rights of marginalised communities, alongside field-based research and advocacy. Views expressed are personal and do not necessarily reflect those of IndiaVerve.
