A deeply concerning increase in the number of students dying by suicide in India has prompted the Supreme Court to issue orders making Higher Education Institutions (HEI) accountable if they fail to take preventive steps. This welcome judgement, which forms part of a continuum of orders, is based on the interim report of the National Task Force (NTF) that uncovers a crisis that has received little focused attention in policymaking. The scale of the problem is evident from the data: there were 8,423 student suicides in India in 2013, and a decade later, the figure had shot up to 13,892, according to the National Crime Records Bureau; the student suicide rate exceeded that of the general population. It is true that youth and students are identified as priority groups for intervention under the National Suicide Prevention Strategy 2022, but as the court noted, even in multi-sectoral interventions, academic, campus-based efforts were fragmented and poorly evaluated. Moreover, the identified problems are only the tip of the iceberg of student distress, Justices J.B. Pardiwala and R. Mahadevan said. Clearly, there has been no concerted effort to address the key stressors—academic expectations, financial distress, social isolation due to caste and community, sexual harassment, and ragging, all of which take a toll on mental health. Even with the problem staring them in the face, governments failed to respond adequately, and the NTF found 65% of HEIs it surveyed did not provide access to any mental health services, while 73% lacked full-time services.
The HEI’s are now on strict notice and they must treat the problem with the seriousness it warrants. In a fast-growing country, it would not be difficult to institute many more scholarships and grants to match high enrolment—the national ambition is to raise gross enrolment in higher education to 50% by 2035. Against the backdrop of what the court calls massification and privatisation of the sector, this commitment should go beyond the sanction of a small number of scholarships and cover all need-based candidates. Some of them could be teaching and research assistantships on the lines of those available in good education systems abroad. In parallel, making full and free healthcare and mental health services accessible on a full-time basis (the latter within 1 km of the institution), as ordered by the court, should instil hope and confidence among students; free counselling facilities can stave off a sharp decline. The NTF found poor uptake of mental health services even in institutes where they existed, and the answer to that would be to address lack of awareness and social stigma. An important part of the SC order deals with fixing responsibility on HEIs through appropriate mechanisms. It is encouraging that the NTF has been asked to propose concrete ways to plug this gap.
