DON’T MOTHER AWAY THIS CRISIS

THE surge of campus suicides is a silent scream echoing off concrete hostel walls, one we can no longer afford to ignore or smother beneath well-intentioned policy.

- THAMIZHACHI THANGAPANDIAN

In 2025 alone, more than 13,000 Indian students died by suicide-7.6 percent of all national suicide cases, a rate that claims one young life almost every hour. We read about these tragedies often as fleeting news items, but rarely do we sit with their urgency and stare at their roots. Institutions search for answers, governments convene panels, yet mothers mourn, friends wonder, and those closest to the crisis-students-tread a terrain of isolation.

Into this discourse IIT Kharagpur has introduced 'Campus Mothers', an initiative intending to place women as anchors of emotional care for young adults battling competitive academia. On paper, the premise is warm, almost poetic: women from faculty households voluntarily trained to recognise student distress, reaching out and listening to struggles in unassuming, everyday moments. The institute reaffirms this is not a replacement for professional mental health services, merely a supplement, a gesture of home for students far from family and familiar comforts.