Student suicides

Underscoring the pressure on students to cope with the highly challenging and competitive atmosphere in the country’s top professional colleges is the grim fact that 69 students died by suicide in the past five years in premier institutes such as IITs (31 deaths), NITs (22), AIIMS (13) and IIMs (3), as per data presented in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday. Of them, 37 were from the reserved categories and 32 from the general category; this shows that students from both backgrounds are almost equally affected by stress. Thus, the contention that caste-based discrimination is a key factor for the suicides is only partially true. Similarly revealing is the fact that these institutes also account for the maximum number of students dropping out: while 8,319 did not complete their courses in the IITs, 5,623 opted out of NITs from 2018 to 2022.

Experts have often pointed out the reluctance of the despairing youngsters to admit to their parents — who generally put everything at stake for their education — that they cannot handle the pressure of studies and that it is pushing them to the brink. Then, there is no guarantee that had they opened up, their parents would have stood by them.

Even as academic stress, mental health and family issues are among the contributing factors, the statistics do cry out for the parents to spare a thought for a likely underlying cause: perhaps their wards’ interests lie elsewhere. The initial onus is on them to allow their children to pursue their dreams rather than pushing them to a place that turns out to be unbearable for them. In addition, addressing this grave issue at the institutional level is vital as these youth, who ace tough exams to enter the portals of these colleges, are a promising human resource.