Why SC-appointed taskforce framed student suicides as not just a mental health issue

What the NTF report says

The NTF’s central argument is that the student suicides have been treated as a mental health problem when they are, in fact, a structural one. Every prior report commissioned on this question approached the problem primarily through counselling infrastructure and individual well-being.

Suicide is rarely attributable to a single cause, psychiatrist Dr Lakshmi Vijaykumar, head of Department of Psychiatry at Voluntary Health Services (VHS), Adyar, Chennai, and founder of SNEHA, an NGO dedicated to the prevention of suicide, told The Indian Express. “It is a medical, social, psychological and cultural problem,” she said.

While studies suggest that half of those who die by suicide may have a mental health disorder, a significant proportion do not. “It may be an acute crisis, a situational disturbance at that moment, or impulsive behaviour,” she said, adding that multiple factors usually converge before a suicide occurs.

The NTF observed that “similar problems related to student well-being have been reported year after year, yet we do not seem to have made much progress in this area”. Its own remit, it said, is “to move beyond reactive measures towards structural, preventive, and sustainable solutions”.

The report framed suicidality as a continuum — one that includes ideation, self-harm, withdrawal, and dropout, not only death. For every suicide in India, it noted, there are more than 200 people experiencing suicidality in some form and more than 15 attempts. The “goal is not to just prevent a student from taking their life and keeping them alive but also to look at the reasons that compelled a student to take this step”. 

What’s missing in law

The NTF’s most important finding is legal. Despite years of reports, University Grants Commission (UGC) regulations, and government strategies, India has no direct statutory framework for suicide prevention in higher education. The report stated: “The most glaring gap is the complete absence of any direct statutory, regulatory or institutional framework to address and prevent suicides. Most interventions are generic and reactive.”

It describes the National Suicide Prevention Strategy, India’s only dedicated policy instrument on the subject, as “abstract with no clear implementation guidelines”. Countries such as the US, Japan, South Korea, and Canada have enacted legislation that fixes institutional accountability and mandates data collection. India’s response has remained at the level of guidelines.

“Statutory framework and regulations framed thereunder have a binding effect on implementation agencies,” the report stated. “Mere guidelines do not have the same impact and hence enforcement of the same throws up challenges.”

This finding comes alongside the second Supreme Court judgment in Sukdeb Saha v. The State of Andhra Pradesh (2025), in which the court held that “mental well-being is inseparable from the right to life” under Article 21 and noted “a legislative and regulatory vacuum in the country with respect to a unified, enforceable framework for suicide prevention of students in educational institutions”.

It issued binding interim guidelines for all schools, colleges, and coaching institutes, but framed these as a stop-gap until comprehensive legislation is enacted. The NTF said that its final report will work within that framework.

Dr Rajesh Sagar, professor of psychiatry at AIIMS New Delhi, told The Indian Express that legal reform should not be viewed as a complete solution. Referring to the decriminalisation of attempted suicide under the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017, he said that “there must be deterrent and preventive mechanisms, but creating a supportive environment is as important as legal mandates”.

How higher education has changed

India went from 8.8 million students in higher education in 2001-02 to 43.2 million in 2021-22. Over 60% of universities and more than 75% of colleges are now privately managed.

Public expenditure on higher education as a share of GDP stood at 1.29% in 2021-2022 — well below the 2% recommended by national committees for decades. The consequence, the report said, is a student body that has changed faster than institutions receiving it.

Some 46% of the students who responded to the NTF survey described themselves as first-generation learners in higher education. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Students from Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) now constitute roughly 60% of total enrolment. But in the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and National Institutes of Technology (NITs), 67.71% of faculty come from non SC/ST/OBC backgrounds; SC faculty are 7.57% of the total, and ST faculty 1.91%. In private universities, 67% of faculty are from privileged backgrounds, 3.59% from SC, and 1.68% are from ST. “This social mismatch,” the report stated, “is likely to result in low academic integration, which may be directly associated with depression, dropout, and suicidal risk.” 

Dr Sagar agreed with the NTF’s assessment that student suicides cannot be understood solely through the lens of individual mental health. Suicide, he said, is a “complex phenomenon” shaped by social conditions and group belonging. Factors such as caste, language, class, rural-urban differences, and gender can leave students feeling alienated within institutions, making social determinants an important part of understanding suicidal behaviour.

Despite the survey being court constituted, the NTF said it found it “shocking” that only 3.5% of over 60,000 higher education institutions responded even after multiple reminders and extended deadlines.

What students and faculty told the NTF

Some 46% of the students who responded to the NTF survey described themselves as first-generation learners in higher education. The data on who stays and who doesn’t tells its own story.

Between 2018 and 2023, over 13,600 students from SC, ST, and OBC communities dropped out of the Central universities, IITs, and Indian Institutes of Management. When asked in Parliament whether the government had studied the reasons for such dropouts, the then Minister of State for Education stated that these were “mainly on account of withdrawal and migration due to students securing seats in other departments/institutions of their choice or on any personal ground”.

The report drew on a 2025 study by researcher Prabhakar Krishnamurthy, which found that SC/ST students in IIT Delhi and Kharagpur “face dropout rates 318% higher than general category peers” and that “financial constraints drive 47.6% of reserved category dropouts, as families lack resources for hostel fees and academic materials”. Elite institutions, the study concluded, offer only a “mirage of mobility” as reservations open the door, but the discrimination students face inside pushes them out.

Students at a state university “spoke extensively about delays, inconsistencies, and inequities in scholarship disbursement”. Some described a situation where colleges deducted scholarship amounts from tuition fees but, when government reimbursements were delayed, held students accountable for the difference. Students were barred from examinations, removed from hostels, and denied marksheets and degrees over arrears they had not created.

What NTF found about counselling services

UGC data lists 27,136 “dedicated counsellors” across higher education: approximately 1 per 221 students. When the NTF examined the qualifications of 50 randomly selected individuals, 47 of the 50 were faculty members, placement coordinators, or academic advisors, not trained mental health professionals. 

More than 70% of institutions have no full-time mental health service provider, and fewer than 4% have a suicide risk management protocol. Of 23 IITs, only four had a standard operating procedure for mental health emergencies, and none had a protocol for what happens after a student dies.

Dr Sagar said the NTF’s concern reflects a larger gap in the mental health system. “Young people should not be treated as miniature adults,” he said, noting that counselling young adults requires specialised training because their aspirations, vulnerabilities, and social environments differ from those of older adults. Mental health professionals trained specifically to work with young populations remain scarce, he said, while universities far outnumber the available specialists.

Some 9% of student survey respondents reported experiencing suicidal thoughts often or very often in the past year. Students across institutions told the NTF they did not trust counselling services because “faculty/supervisors, administrators and parents had been informed in the past”.

Dr Vijayalakshmi said that in counselling services, confidentiality is central to building trust. Information disclosed during counselling should ordinarily remain confidential except in situations where a student consents to such disclosure or faces an imminent risk of self-harm. Even in such cases, institutions should try to involve the student in identifying a trusted person who can provide support rather than treating disclosure purely as an administrative exercise.

“Creating more awareness, removing the stigma, and encouraging open discussion of mental health should become part of campus culture rather than remaining confined to crisis interventions,” Dr Sagar said.

On medical education specifically, students described on-call hours of 36 to 48 hours at a stretch, without sleep or food. Those who asked for leave or rest were called “weak”, “lazy”, and people who “just do not want to work”. One student described medical education as a form of “bonded labour”. At a nursing college in Delhi, the requirement was 100% attendance, with phones required to be deposited daily after a recent suicide, which left students “completely disconnected from family and friends”.

The report also documented that when students arrive, peers and faculty ask for JEE and NEET ranks as a way of reading caste through admission category. On campus, access to programmes and placement networks is controlled through informal “vibe checks”, interviews where English fluency and urban grooming determine who gets in. Students from tier-2 cities are referred to by the slur “chhapri”.

For students whose families are the source of pressure, or who are LGBTQ+, the institutional policy of informing parents in high-risk situations closes off formal help-seeking entirely. The faculty, on their part, described student mental health as an individual problem: “Our job is to teach and research, but neither the teaching nor the caring is being done fully, because we are stretched too thin.”

NTF’s recommendations

The interim recommendations are framed as steps that can be taken before the final report. Faculty vacancies, including reserved category posts, must be filled within 3 months. Vice chancellor and registrar posts must not remain vacant beyond a month.

All institutions must report student suicides to the regulators and state nodal officers regardless of where the death occurred. Every residential institution must have access to qualified medical help round the clock. And the National Crime Records Bureau must separately count school and higher education student suicides in its annual data. 

On the question of legislation, the NTF does not yet make a recommendation — that is reserved for the final report. But the interim report stated that the existing policy infrastructure without a statutory force has not worked.