Keeping students off the abyss

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.

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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 o