Shrinking of employment opportunities is another factor. A issue is the absence of adequate job security; the high prevalence of suicide among daily wage earners is a case in point
Young Indians are snuffing out their own lives at an alarming rate. Statistics bear out the grimness of the situation. According to the latest National Crime Records Bureau data, India reported 1,70,924 suicides in 2022 — the highest in the world — out of which those aged between 18 and 30 comprised a staggering 35% and minors 6% of the total deaths. That is not all. Student suicides witnessed a spike of 4%, numbering 13,044 or 7.6% of the total figure. There seems to be a worrying overlap between the datasets pertaining to India and the world. According to the World Health Organization, suicide is the third leading global cause of death among those aged 15-29 years; a 2024 study published in Springer stated that suicide accounted for about 52,000 deaths annually in children and adolescents. Delving into the root causes of such deaths, as the recently-held National Suicide Prevention Conference attempted to do, is important. One of the factors that came up in the analysis is the rising stress of examinations. The relentless pressure to perform, driven by overambitious guardians, a score-based education system, coupled with the fierce competition for limited seats in premier educational institutions, places a formidable burden on students’ mental health. The rising cases of suicide at Kota, India’s principal coaching hub for competitive examinations, serve as an example of this: seven cases have already been reported in the first two months of this year. The shrinking of employment opportunities is another causal factor. A related issue is the absence of adequate job security; the high prevalence of suicide among daily wage earners is a case in point. Oppression due to caste discrimination is rampant, even in elite educational institutions, aggravating the sense of alienation among students from marginalised communities.
India must prioritise mental healthcare. The introduction of mental health in the school curriculum under the National Education Policy is a positive step. But this needs to be complemented by interventions in affiliated spaces — from improving the ratio between the number of therapists and modern treatment facilities and student populations to better employment opportunities for the youth to addressing the prohibitive cost of therapy, among other measures. But the shoots of change must begin at home. Indian families, overwhelmingly conservative temperamentally, need to understand that mental well-being matters.
Source: Telegraph India; 24.02.25
