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In just the two months of 2025, six cases of student suicides took place in Kota, the hotbed of Indian Institutes of Technology.
The recent alleged death by suicide case of Prakriti Lamsal, a Nepali student at Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT) in Odisha, has not only stoked a diplomatic row between India and Nepal but also has brought the issue of mental health in the limelight.
In just the two months of 2025, six cases of student death by suicides took place in Kota, the hotbed of Indian Institutes of Technology-Joint Entrance Examination (IIT-JEE) coaching in India, apart from a few solitary student death by suicide instances in different parts of the country.
Similarly, 37 students died by suicide across 11 of the 23 IITs from 2019-2020 to 2023-2024, while Kota witnessed 26 and 17 student death by suicide cases in 2023 and 2024 respectively, according to various media reports.
Death by suicides in India have grown from 135,445 in 2012 to 170,924 in 2022 at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 2.35 per cent during this ten-year period.
According to the 'Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India' reports by National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), student suicide incidents nearly doubled from 6,654 in 2012 to 13,044 in 2022, growing at a CAGR of 6.96 per cent.
This is nearly three times the CAGR of total death by suicides in the country.
Moreover, the share of student death by suicides in total death by suicide cases increased from 4.91 per cent in 2012 to 8.18 per cent in 2020, before coming down marginally to 7.63 per cent in 2022.
Maharashtra (1,764 cases in 2022) tops the list in the number of student death by suicides, followed by Tamil Nadu and Madhya Pradesh with 1,406 and 1,340 such cases, respectively.
Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand saw an upsurge in student death by suicides with 1,060 and 824 cases in 2022 respectively.
Feature Presentation: Ashish Narsale/Rediff.com
