A wave of student suicides is sweeping India, and there’s a danger of it assuming tsunami proportions. According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), over 13,000 students committed suicide in 2021 — a five-year high and a rise of 4.5 percent from the 12,526 deaths recorded in 2020 when a student died by suicide every 42 minutes. The overwhelming majority of these children and youth who have taken the extreme step, have been driven over the edge by the country’s high-pressure education system defined by poor quality teaching-learning in K-12 education and cut-throat competition to enter the much too-few globally benchmarked undergrad colleges and universities. With the great majority of 21st century India’s 1.4 million primary-secondaries — especially 1 million government schools — mired in rote learning, regular full-time schooling is not good enough to clear the country’s hyper-competitive undergraduate entrance exams. Most school-leavers sign up with test prep coaching schools to crack these exams. Yet even after cramming for 12-14 hours per day in drill-n-skills coaching schools, the majority of school-leavers are rejected because of limited capacity in the country’s too few high-quality higher education institutions. For instance, the country’s 23 elite IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology) and 31 NITs (National Institutes of Technology) admit merely 32,000 school-leavers per year, i.e, 2 percent of the 1.6 million who write their JEE (Main) followed by JEE (Advanced) exams. Ditto, the country’s 654 medical colleges admit a mere 88,120 of the 1.5 million students who write NEET. Against this backdrop, the burden of high parental expectations, society and peers to top national entrance exams is proving too much for an exponentially rising number of aspirational children and youth. In our cover story this month, we beam a spotlight on this disturbing trend of student suicides with a special focus on what parents can do to prevent children and youth from self-harm and suicide. The PW editorial team interviewed knowledgeable mental health professionals and counselors to share ways and means to prevent young citizens from descending into depression, self-harm and worse. They have provided some excellent suggestions about equipping children with the skills to manage failure and cope with academic and exam stress. Also check out our Early Childhood feature about ways parents can prepare their first-borns for arrival of a new sibling and special Mother’s Day interview with Dr. Sumithra Prasad, founder of DORAI Foundation and mother of a special needs person with special achievements.
