“I am writing to you today not only as one of 80 postgraduate medical students affected by scheduled caste, but as an individual whose life is in imminent danger because of the very systemic failings that your task force was formed to address.”
Thus began the 2025 testimony of a Dalit student from Gujarat before a national task force appointed by the Supreme Court to look into allegations of institutional discrimination, especially against marginalized communities, on campus. The student, who remained anonymous, claimed that a bureaucratic change in the definition of his scholarship program led to payments being halted over the past two years, causing difficulties.
“For over a year, my career has been involuntarily put on hold… My situation is a vivid case study of how systemic indifference can make a student feel that ending their life is the only way out,” the email, seen by HT, said.
Unfortunately, this was not an isolated case. In its November 2025 interim report to the Supreme Court published on Monday, the 18-member body cited widespread discrimination, weak grievance redress mechanisms, academic pressure and severe gaps in mental health support across higher education institutions.
“Student suicide represents only the visible tip of a much larger iceberg of student distress,” the report said. “Beneath the surface lies a wide range of distress: suicide attempts, negative death thoughts and wishes, attempts at self-harm, severe mental health struggles, and experiences of discrimination or exclusion.”
Social and structural factors at play
The committee found that student suicides are on the rise despite a decline in the number of young people, and described the trend as a matter of “grave concern” that requires urgent institutional reforms.
The committee warned that interventions that focus solely on mental illness will have limited impact without addressing the underlying “social, structural and institutional factors.”
“Student suicides reflect not only individual distress, but also indicate failure at institutional and systemic levels… However, if interventions are framed only through the lens of mental health and illness, their impact will remain limited. There is a need for a broader understanding, and recognition of the role of social, structural and institutional factors,” the report said.
The task force was set up after the Supreme Court took cognizance of the deaths of two IIT-Delhi BTech students — 21-year-old Anil Kumar, a scheduled tribe student who died in July 2023, and 20-year-old Aayush Ashna, a scheduled caste student who died in January 2024. Their families had alleged caste-based discrimination, prompting the Supreme Court to order the registration of an FIR and constitute the task force in March. 2025.
The 192-page report identified what it called “small but significant patterns of suicide clusters” across higher education campuses, saying the student deaths were “merely a manifestation of distress” and reflected broader institutional and social factors rather than isolated tragedies.
Drawing on media reports from January to August 2025, the NTF identified 210 student suicides. Information was available for 198 cases, with engineering students responsible for 63 deaths, followed by medical students (47) and nursing students (16). The committee noted that while cases covered by the media are dominated by engineering and medical students, suicides among medical students appear disproportionately high when enrollment figures are taken into account.
Class bias is a pressure
A large section of the report focuses on discrimination based on caste, which it describes as the main lens through which the social dimensions of student suicide in contemporary India have been understood.
The committee explicitly said that general category students never raised caste and said caste bias did not exist in their institution. But Dalit and Adivasi students pointed to systemic and rampant discrimination – including by professors.
The report said: “Students discussed how they faced discrimination in oral assessments, despite receiving good grades in written exams, and professors humiliated them for being ‘undeserving’ because they were accepted by reservation, and if they were qualified in the general section, they were indirectly pressured to register for the reserved seat, as the administration asked them to sign a pledge to waive reservation benefits if they chose the general seat.”
If they are politically active about caste discrimination, they will be targeted and discriminated against by professors. Students reported that harassment by professors and supervisors led to suicide attempts, but it was completely suppressed by the university and the faculty members involved were not held accountable. “The institution had no history of student suicides, but one student felt that this insidious discrimination led to dropout — not a loss of life per se, but certainly to the academic future of marginalized students,” the report added.
The committee said the issue gained public importance through cases such as that of researcher Rohith Vemula, who died by suicide at the University of Hyderabad in January 2016, and postgraduate medical student Payal Tadvi, who died in Mumbai in May 2019 after allegations of caste-based molestation and harassment. “While a small number of cases have led to public campaigns like Rohith Vemula and Payal Tadvi, most are anonymous,” the report said.
Citing recent studies, the NTF said elite institutions often only offer a “mirage of mobility” to students from Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and OBC communities. “Upper-class peers often question their worth, while faculty dismiss academic difficulties as a ‘lack of innate ability,’” she noted. The report added that “social mismatch” between faculty members largely belonging to socially advantaged groups and an increasingly diverse student body creates exclusionary environments and experiences of discrimination and “othering.”
“The secondary literature on class-based discrimination and its links to student suicide reveals how discriminatory practices reached the point of causing a student to take his or her life,” she said.
Language was flagged as another axis of differentiation. Limited English proficiency has become a basis for segregation and discrimination in higher education institutions with only English-medium teaching methods and an English-dominated social environment. For socially marginalized students, this has led to a significant decline in their self-esteem and sense of belonging, the report said.
Mental health support gaps
The committee, headed by former Supreme Court judge Justice S Ravindra Bhatt, said stakeholder consultations and a pan-India online survey showed that student distress is often linked to a mix of academic, social, financial and institutional factors. Apart from receiving responses from 2,119 higher education institutions between August 8 and September 19 last year, the NTF held 30 meetings across 19 institutional locations in Delhi, National Capital Region, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Assam and West Bengal.
Based on the responses, the committee found serious gaps in mental health support systems. Overall, 65% of institutions reported not having access to mental health providers, while 1,537 institutions (73%) lacked any full-time mental health professional. Only 169 institutions (8%) reported one full-time provider, and 154 (7%) reported having two to five. Less than 20% had formal relationships with nearby mental health services and less than 4% had a protocol for suicide risk assessment and management. More than 82% of institutions reported 50 or fewer new counseling enrollments within one year, while 45% had not conducted faculty education workshops on student mental health in the previous 18 months.
The report cautioned that these results are preliminary, based on a response rate of 3.5% among 60,383 higher education institutions. It also recorded student concerns about discrimination based on class, gender, disability, language and regional identity, inadequate support for first-generation learners, and financial pressures. Strict attendance rules, academic load, poor hostel facilities, and ineffective grievance mechanisms.
The NTF warned against “tokenistic implementation” of mental health measures and said: “The challenge of student mental health cannot be addressed through counseling services alone,” stressing the need for a “whole-of-institution approach” that integrates governance, teaching practices, student support and campus culture.
Among its recommendations, the commission called for the creation of a central mechanism to collect and analyze student suicide data, mandatory training for faculty to identify at-risk students, stronger anti-discrimination measures, career counseling services, clear crisis response protocols, and stronger grievance redress systems.
A committee member told HT that work on the final report is ongoing and the surveys were closed in December 2025 after receiving responses from 16,750 higher education institutions. More than 1.28 million students, 160,000 faculty members, 226,000 parents, more than 6,800 mental health professionals and 225,000 members of the public participated in the conference. The NTF also conducted field visits to 29 institutions in nine states, the member said.
But we will have a long way to go. As the Commission found, grievance redress mechanisms were dysfunctional or absent in most institutions, even for basic phenomena such as complaining, which is already prohibited. Students told the committee that bureaucratic responses stymied their complaints and ultimately provided no solution. “We go again and again,” one student said. “Unless we protest, nothing will happen.”
