Red Alert! Rising Tide Of Child & Youth Suicides

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, over 13,000 children & youth committed suicide in 2021 - a five-year high and a rise of 4.5 percent from the 12,526 deaths recorded in 2020 when a minor died by suicide every 42 minutes

- KHUSHBOO NEHAAL JASHNANI, MINI P. & CYNTHIA JOHN

On April 19, the New York-based United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) officially declared India as the world’s most populous country surpassing China which has held this ‘title’ for the past thousand years. However, unlike neighbouring China whose communist regime imposed a one-child per family law for over three decades and irredeemably altered the demographic profile of the country for the worse, India hosts the world’s largest youngest population.

Currently, India’s child and youth population under age 24 is estimated at 254 million and 850 million Indian citizens are in the 24-64 age group — the world’s largest working age population. But, due to half a century of under-investment in education and neglect of human resource development, the great majority of the country’s children have had the joys of childhood sucked out of them and aspirational youth from the lower reaches of the country’s iniquitous socio-economic pyramid are leading lives of quiet desperation. Consider this:

May 8. Mohammed Nasid (22), a student from Bengaluru, studying at a coaching centre in Kota, Rajasthan and preparing for the past year to write the competitive National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) for entry into the country’s much too-few 654 medical colleges, ended his life by jumping from the tenth floor of a multistorey building.

May 11. Dhanesh Kumar Sharma (15), a resident of Uttar Pradesh and coaching for NEET, hanged himself to death in Kota.

May 12. Seventeen-year-old NEET aspirant Navlesh from Patna committed suicide in his hostel room in Kota.

May 25. Aryan (16), a native of Nalanda, Bihar, also prepping to write the NEET, died by hanging in his hostel room in Kota.