When parents who had earlier lost children at IIT Bombay joined the protests after the death of the second-year student Sahil Wakode in September, they said they were asking the same questions again. Wakode’s parents have alleged caste discrimination and harassment and have been holding a protest in Mumbai every day to draw attention to their concerns. The institute says it received no complaint of caste discrimination from Wakode and that the police are investigating. Students have sought changes in mechanisms for counselling, grievance-handling, academic discipline, and campus welfare.
The protests came as two official exercises made it possible to place such deaths in a wider frame. The National Crime Records Bureau’s (NCRB) latest Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India report shows how the country’s suicide profile has shifted over a decade. The Supreme Court-appointed National Task Force (NTF) on Mental Health of Students and Prevention of Suicides in Higher Education Institutes examines what happens inside higher educational institutions, including academic competition, isolation, discrimination, and institutional responses.
“Student suicides reflect not only individual distress but also point to failure at the institutional and systemic levels,” the NTF states in the preface to its interim report.
The Supreme Court constituted the NTF on March 24, 2025, in Amit Kumar & Others v. Union of India, a case arising from two unrelated deaths by suicide of IIT Delhi students; the police had refused to register FIRs in both instances. Chaired by a former Supreme Court judge, Justice S. Ravindra Bhat, the NTF comprises experts in mental health, education, disability, the social sciences, and law.
Its mandate spans counselling to examining academic pressure, financial burden, ragging, discrimination, sexual harassment, and the quality of institutional systems. Its interim report combines data from the NCRB and other sources, surveys, consultations, and campus visits. By June 2026, it had visited 30 higher educational institutions across 10 States and held 25 stakeholder consultations; its final report is due by October 31, 2026. The NTF says in the preface to the interim report that it will carry out its mandate “within the framework of the directions” in Sukdeb Saha v. the State of Andhra Pradesh (2025). In that case the Supreme Court held that “mental health is an integral component of the right to life under Article 21”.
In its preliminary assessment of existing policy, the NTF calls the “complete absence of any direct statutory, regulatory, or institutional framework to address and prevent suicides” the most glaring gap, while noting that many existing interventions are generic and reactive.
Read together, the NTF’s interim report and the NCRB data point to a distinctive student story. India recorded 1,70,746 suicides in 2024, about 30 per cent more than in 2014. Student suicides rose from 8,068 to 14,488 over the same period, an increase of nearly 80 per cent. Their share of all recorded suicides increased from 6.1 per cent to 8.5 per cent.
Students now sit close to several major NCRB categories
The NCRB classifies people who died by suicide according to profession or status. These groups have very different population sizes, so their raw counts cannot be read as comparative suicide risks. They do, however, show how large the student category has become within the recorded total.
In 2024, the NCRB recorded 14,488 student suicides. That was only 290 fewer than the 14,778 deaths recorded among unemployed people, and 2,417 fewer than the 16,905 among salaried or professional workers. Student deaths exceeded the 10,546 recorded for the farming sector. Within the salaried or professional category, 12,811 deaths were among private-sector employees. Daily-wage earners remained by far the largest occupational group, with 52,910 deaths, followed by housewives at 22,113..
Student suicides are way closer to gender parity
The sharper distinction appears when gender is added. Men accounted for 73.5 per cent of all recorded suicide deaths in 2024. Among daily-wage earners, 91.3 per cent of deaths were of males; the corresponding shares were 92.7 per cent among the self-employed; 93.2 per cent in the farming sector; 89.3 per cent among salaried or professional workers; and 83.8 per cent among the unemployed.
Also Read | IIT Bombay suicide and the caste factor
The gender ratios of student deaths were close to parity: 7,669 male and 6,819 female deaths, or 52.9 per cent and 47.1 per cent. A denominator-adjusted academic study of NCRB data produced a similar contrast for 2021. It estimated suicide death rates of 34.6 per lakh for male daily-wage earners against 13.1 for women, and 48.2 against 27.8 among the unemployed. For students, the rates were almost identical, at 3.3 for males and 3.4 for females.
The NTF’s disaggregation of 2022 NCRB student data reveals another split hidden inside the national student total. Among students below 18, 3,633 female deaths were recorded against 2,904 male deaths. In the 18–30 age group the pattern reversed, with 3,774 male deaths against 2,347 female deaths. The student category, therefore, contains at least two different age-gender patterns, with school-age girls and older male students requiring separate attention.
The reason for this reversal is unclear from the data, but it suggests that school-age girls and older male students may face different age-specific social, family, academic, and career pressures.
Has the rise merely followed enrolment?
To test whether the rise merely reflects a larger student population, NCRB deaths can be set against Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+) school enrolment data and All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) enrolment data. Together, they provide a closer denominator for the NCRB’s broad “student” category than higher-education enrolment alone.
The combined school and higher-education enrolment was about 30.37 crore in 2014–15 and 30.85 crore in 2021–22, up only by 1.6 per cent. Student suicides rose from 8,068 in 2014 to 13,089 in 2021. The indicative measure, therefore, increased from 2.66 to 4.24 deaths per lakh enrolled students. Matching the NCRB 2022 deaths with 2022–23 enrolment takes it to 4.40.
The annual series rises from 2.66 in 2014–15 to 3.19 in 2016–17, stays near 3.4 in 2018–20 and jumps above 4 in 2020–21. The pattern shows that expansion of enrolment alone cannot account for the rise in recorded student deaths.
This remains an indicative measure. For each year, the NCRB student-suicide count is divided by combined UDISE+ school enrolment and AISHE higher-education enrolment, and the result is multiplied by 1,00,000. The NCRB reports deaths by calendar year, while the UDISE+ and the AISHE use academic years; the calculation matches each NCRB year to the academic year beginning in that year. The administrative universes may also differ at the margins.
The distinction matters because Table 10 in the NTF interim report divides all NCRB student suicides by AISHE higher-education enrolment alone. The NCRB’s “student” category, however, also includes school-age students, including thousands below 18 in the NTF’s own age tables. The numerator and denominator therefore do not describe the same population, and the resulting figure cannot be read as a precise higher-education suicide rate.
The public health researchers Rakhi Dandona and G. Anil Kumar, along with the AIIMS psychiatrist Rajesh Sagar, raised a similar concern (in an essay titled “Beyond the numbers: interpreting the rise in student suicide deaths in India”, National Library of Medicine). They point out that the NCRB’s broad student category lacks a directly matched population denominator and that its public tables do not show recorded causes specifically for students.
Our calculation, therefore, combines school and higher-education enrolment to get closer to the population represented by the NCRB’s student count, although it remains an indicative measure rather than a formal suicide rate.
Exam failure has fallen, but academic pressure is a wider category
The public NCRB tables create another difficulty: they do not cross-tabulate the recorded “cause” of suicide with student status. It is therefore unsafe to say how many student suicides were caused by examination failure, family problems, or any other category from the national cause table.
What can be said is that examination failure has become a smaller part of the broader youth suicide profile. The NCRB recorded 2,744 deaths attributed to failure in examinations in 2019 and 2,032 in 2024. Among those below 18, the number fell from 1,577 to 1,071; in the 18–29 age group it fell from 1,091 to 884. In the same period, among those aged 18 to 29, deaths recorded under drug or alcohol addiction rose from 1,909 to 3,274; the NCRB separately lists illness, family problems, love affairs, and marriage-related issues as recorded causes of suicide.
One explanation for the decline in the exam-failure category comes from the suicide-prevention specialist Lakshmi Vijayakumar. Writing in 2024 (“Exam failure suicides and policy initiatives in India”, The Lancet Regional Health – Southeast Asia), she linked part of the fall to supplementary examinations, which allow students who fail one or two subjects to retake them without losing an academic year. She reported a 70 per cent fall in exam-failure suicides in Tamil Nadu and 82 per cent in Chennai after the policy was introduced, while warning that highly competitive entrance examinations continue to generate intense pressure.
The NTF helps explain why a declining “exam failure” entry cannot be equated with declining academic pressure. In its institutional visits, intense academic loads and competition repeatedly surfaced in discussions of loneliness and social isolation. At the IITs, faculty described a relentless culture in which success is narrowly defined by grades, ranks, and placement packages, leading students to “reduce their entire personality into numbers”.
The report says extremely competitive academic culture was the most cited reason for social isolation across the institutions visited. Students also described language barriers, financial insecurity, difficulties in adjusting from school to college, weak peer support, and discrimination. These findings are qualitative and institution-specific, but they broaden the frame beyond a failed examination as a single triggering event.
On a college campus. A nationwide survey by the NTF, drawing responses from more than 2.43 lakh students, found that 15 per cent had experienced a period of feeling overwhelmed, distressed, low or anxious for several weeks in the previous six months, while 9 per cent reported suicidal thoughts often or very often in the previous year.
| Photo Credit:
Getty Images/iStockphoto
A nationwide survey by the NTF drew responses from more than 2.43 lakh students, 67 per cent of whom belonged to the SCs, STs, and OBCs. It found that 15 per cent had experienced a period of feeling overwhelmed, distressed, low, or anxious for several weeks in the previous six months, while 9 per cent reported suicidal thoughts often or very often in the previous year.
About 34 per cent said they had felt like outsiders on campus to varying degrees; 56 per cent expressed trust in their institution’s administration to handle serious issues fairly; and 32 per cent said their institution did not offer counselling services.
The mental health specialists Seema Mehrotra of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences and Lakshmi Vijayakumar have also cautioned against treating counselling as a box-ticking exercise (“Strengthening student mental health support systems in India: reflections on the Supreme Court’s landmark guidelines”, The Lancet Regional Health – Southeast Asia). In their 2025 commentary, they wrote that implementation of the Supreme Court’s student mental health guidelines requires “more than tokenistic compliance”. They identified gaps in data on counsellor qualifications and service uptake, shortages of trained professionals, stigma, and lack of trust in confidentiality as obstacles to effective campus support and called for standardised qualifications, better reporting, and sustained monitoring.
The missing religion and caste series
A major NCRB data gap also matters here. The public tables classify suicides by age, gender, profession, educational attainment, marital and economic status, method, cause, and State or Union Territory, but they provide no regular national series by caste or religion.
In a Lok Sabha answer on March 21, 2017, the Ministry of Home Affairs said the NCRB had begun collecting, from 2014, suicide data for SCs, STs, OBCs, “others”, and religious groups. It withheld publication of this information because of inconsistencies in data supplied by some States and Union Territories.
Researchers later obtained the unpublished 2014–15 data and found substantial geographical variation by religion and social group. Those figures are too old to be used for interpreting the situation in 2024.
The NTF discusses discrimination on the basis of caste and religious belief, but its interim report does not supply a current religion-wise suicide rate. This leaves a serious gap for a student-centred analysis.
Caste-discrimination allegations recur in campus disputes, yet the national series cannot show whether the burden is shifting across caste or religious groups. India can track student deaths by gender and, increasingly, by age but not by some of the inequalities that the NTF is examining.
How India compares internationally among young adults
The international comparison becomes more revealing when the same age group is used across countries. The WHO estimates that suicide was the third leading cause of death among 15–29-year-olds globally in 2021. Its country estimates put India at 15.9 deaths per lakh in this age group. Among a selected set of Asian, South Asian, and Western comparators, South Korea, Japan, the US, and Sri Lanka recorded higher estimated rates, while Nepal, the UK, Bangladesh, and China recorded lower estimated rates.
Gender makes the comparison more striking. The WHO estimates the suicide rate among Indian women aged between 15 and 29 at 17.0 per lakh and among men at 15.0. India is the only country in this selected comparison in which the female rate exceeds the male rate. That does not establish that student suicides follow the same pattern because the 15–29 population includes students and non-students alike, but it places the near gender parity in India’s student-suicide count in a wider context. The WHO figures are modelled estimates intended for cross-country comparison. Data quality varies substantially: only 86 of the 183 countries for which the WHO produced its 2021 estimates had high- or medium-quality vital-registration data. The WHO classifies India’s underlying data quality as very low.
A different way to read the student number
The student category deserves attention for more than its raw growth. Its 2024 count is almost the same as the unemployed category and higher than the farming-sector count. The increase also survives adjustment for enrolment: the indicative measure rose from 2.66 deaths per lakh enrolled students in 2014–15 to 4.40 in 2022–23. Students are much closer to gender parity than the major work-status groups, while the NTF’s age data show a female excess below 18 and a male excess from 18 to 30.
Also Read | Begins at the base
The findings point away from a single explanation. Academic competition intersects with isolation, financial pressure, discrimination, family and relationship stresses, mental health needs, and institutional support. Better disaggregated data will be as important as institutional reform. Until the NCRB can connect student status with age, cause, caste, and other variables, India will continue to count the deaths more precisely than it can explain the patterns beneath them.
Data note
This analysis uses the NCRB Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India series, UDISE+ school-enrolment data, AISHE higher-education enrolment, the NTF interim report, Ministry of Education material, WHO estimates, and peer-reviewed research. For the enrolment-adjusted series, each NCRB calendar year is matched to the academic year beginning in that year; school and higher-education enrolment are combined, and deaths are expressed per lakh enrolled students. The resulting figure is an indicative measure rather than a formal epidemiological rate. The NCRB’s profession/status and recorded-cause categories are administrative classifications, and the NTF cautions that public suicide datasets underestimate deaths because of stigma and recording limitations.
N.V. Geetha is a former Senior Technical Director at the National Informatics Centre. She writes data-based stories.
References
1. NCRB, Accidental Deaths & Suicides in India
2. National Task Force interim report
3. Ministry of Education / PIB, NTF progress update, June 30, 2026
4 Ministry of Home Affairs, Lok Sabha Unstarred Question No. 3132, March 21,2017
5. Suryakant Yadav and others; “Changing pattern of suicide deaths in India”, The Lancet Regional Health – Southeast Asia (2023)
6. Vikas Arya and others; “The Geographic Heterogeneity of Suicide Rates in India by Religion, Caste, Tribe, and Other Backward Classes” (2019)
7. WHO, “Suicide worldwide in 2021: global health estimates”
8. NITI Aayog, School Education System in India: Temporal Analysis and Policy Roadmap for Quality Enhancement (UDISE+ enrolment series). Primary source.
9 Ministry of Education, AISHE 2017-18 (historical higher-education enrolment series). Primary source.
10. Ministry of Education, AISHE 2021-22. Primary Source.
11. Ministry of Education, Annual Report 2024-25 (AISHE 2022-23). Primary source.
