“Students are growing up in an environment where failure is portrayed not as a temporary setback but as personal collapse. A child preparing for NEET or JEE often sacrifices adolescence itself. Friendships shrink. Sleep disappears. Anxiety becomes routine. Families invest life savings into coaching centres that market success like a lottery ticket. When examinations are postponed, cancelled or surrounded by uncertainty, the emotional fallout is devastating because these students are conditioned to believe their entire future rests on a single result.
The tragedy is not only that students are dying. The tragedy is that many no longer see alternatives beyond success or death.
Educational institutions frequently respond after every suicide with familiar statements about counselling support and internal committees.”
Another student is dead. This time, a BITS Goa student, reportedly the seventh such suicide linked to the institution in recent years. Around the same time, another young life in Goa was lost after the cancellation of the NEET examination shattered months, perhaps years, of preparation and hope. Two different circumstances, two different students, but one disturbing question binds them together: what exactly are we doing to our young people?
India today celebrates academic achievement with the intensity of a national obsession. Marks have become identity. Ranks determine self worth. Entrance exams are treated like life sentences disguised as opportunities. Behind every topper’s photograph splashed across coaching institute hoardings are thousands of students silently collapsing under unbearable pressure.
What is unfolding across campuses and competitive exam systems is no longer an isolated mental health issue. It is a structural crisis.
Students are growing up in an environment where failure is portrayed not as a temporary setback but as personal collapse. A child preparing for NEET or JEE often sacrifices adolescence itself. Friendships shrink. Sleep disappears. Anxiety becomes routine. Families invest life savings into coaching centres that market success like a lottery ticket. When examinations are postponed, cancelled or surrounded by uncertainty, the emotional fallout is devastating because these students are conditioned to believe their entire future rests on a single result.
The tragedy is not only that students are dying. The tragedy is that many no longer see alternatives beyond success or death.
Educational institutions frequently respond after every suicide with familiar statements about counselling support and internal committees. But if seven students linked to one premier institution have died over time, serious questions must be asked. Are campuses truly equipped to identify emotional distress early? Are students treated as human beings or merely as performers in a high pressure academic machine? Has the culture of relentless competition quietly normalised suffering?
Mental health support in many institutions remains reactive instead of preventive. Counsellors are either too few, inaccessible or treated as symbolic requirements rather than central support systems. Many students fear seeking help because vulnerability itself is seen as weakness in hyper competitive environments.
The problem begins much earlier than college.
Parents, schools and society collectively create impossible expectations. Children are taught to fear failure before they even understand life. A teenager scoring 85 percent is made to feel inadequate because someone else scored 95. Social media amplifies the pressure further, constantly showcasing curated success stories while hiding emotional breakdowns behind closed doors.
We must also confront the cruelty embedded in India’s entrance examination culture. One examination often decides years of effort. A technical glitch, policy confusion, leaked paper or sudden cancellation can emotionally devastate students who have invested everything into preparation. The system rarely acknowledges the psychological burden it imposes.
Yet public discussion after every student suicide remains painfully shallow. We mourn briefly, trend hashtags for a day and then move on until the next death arrives. Institutions protect reputations. Coaching centres continue advertisements. Politicians promise inquiries. Nothing fundamentally changes.
Where are we heading as a society if our brightest young minds increasingly associate existence with performance metrics?
Education was supposed to expand possibilities, build confidence and nurture human potential. Instead, it is becoming a conveyor belt of exhaustion, anxiety and emotional isolation. Students today are more connected digitally than ever before, yet many feel profoundly alone. They are surrounded by competition but starved of reassurance.
This crisis demands far more than counselling cells and helpline numbers. India needs a cultural shift in the way success, ambition and failure are understood. Schools must actively teach emotional resilience alongside academics. Parents must stop treating children as extensions of unrealised dreams. Institutions must reduce toxic academic environments instead of glorifying burnout as discipline.
Most importantly, young people must repeatedly hear a truth society rarely tells them loudly enough: no examination, no semester and no career setback is greater than life itself.
Every student suicide is not merely a personal tragedy. It is evidence of collective failure. A society that produces brilliant engineers and doctors while simultaneously pushing its students toward despair cannot call itself truly educated.
Until we begin valuing mental wellbeing as seriously as marksheets, these deaths will continue to haunt classrooms, campuses and families across the country. And each time, we will ask the same question too late: could this have been prevented?
