There’s a teen suicide epidemic in Kota, and it’s getting worse
Manavendra Pratap Singh, 23, describes how he was immediately taken by the “mahaul” (environment) of Kota when he arrived there five years ago. “There’s a certain quality to the air here, one that is just conducive to the competitiveness of the exams so many students come here for,” he tells The Established. But when that same competitiveness morphs into a cycle of anxiety and stress, the Lucknow-based medical aspirant added, not many can take the pressure.
Singh is one of the hundreds of thousands of students who descend upon the dusty city of Kota in India’s Rajasthan every year. To be precise, that number is estimated at 250,000 students, who arrive annually to prepare for the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) and Joint Entrance Examination (JEE). Both these exams, though regarded as some of India’s toughest, are the golden ticket to top engineering and medical colleges in the country, which, in turn, are gateways to the prized, upwardly-mobile jobs of doctors and engineers. This dream—which is as much a stereotype of Indian aspirations, as a deadly obsession—is promised but never guaranteed.
A STIGMA AROUND FAILURE
Since the beginning of this year, 27 students have died by suicide in Kota (at the time of writing this article), eliciting response from the city’s administration. There are counsellors in every other corner, student helplines, and local authorities reminding students not to take any extreme steps. Some hostels have installed CCTV cameras, biometric systems, and nets in multi-storeyed buildings. Last week, the Union Education Minister Dharmentra Pradhan even suggested that perhaps it’s time to end the system of coaching.
But so far, this coaching haven—which is home to 150 private coaching institutions—operates without a legal or governance framework. Last week, Indian authorities released findings from a survey of 6,000 students in Kota that said that over one per cent of them suffered from clinical depression.
The root cause of this stress is complex, says Singh, who is currently preparing for his entrance examination for medicine. “There’s a big stigma around failure in our country, and that reflects in Kota’s competitive environment as well,” he says. “In Kota, the pressure to not fail is collective. But it honestly depends on the students too on how much pressure they’re in. Parents spend a lot of money to make their kids study there and, sometimes, kids feel that pressure too.”
“Honestly, I don’t think you can point the blame on any one person,” adds Singh. “The focus should be on learning, and not a fixation to not fail.”
India, the world’s largest democracy, presents a wild paradox to the world. On the one hand, the presence of Indians in top global tech jobs exhibits a promising and ambitious picture of the country’s US$117-billion education industry. Its top institutions of technology and management, after all, churned out global business leaders like Sundar Pichai of Alphabet and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella. But the other side of the same system is dark, controversial and, in several cases, deadly. And Kota is a major part of that side.
Despite having some of the world’s youngest population, India has only a handful of jobs for them. In June this year, 500 MBBS doctors competed for 20 jobs in Delhi. Another study found that only three per cent of engineering graduates in India end up getting high-quality tech jobs. India’s unemployment rate, in fact, is at 6.1 per cent, the highest ever recorded in the country. Despite such slim chances of quality jobs, over 2 million students sat for NEET exams to compete for 140,000 seats, while over a million students sat for 10,000 engineering seats at the Indian Institutes of Technology, this year. Many of them have done their preparations from Kota.
The US$721 million-coaching industry in Kota is fuelled by the desperation of parents who are willing to shell out an average of over US$100,000 a year to send their kids to the hot, dusty city. Students study for up to 18 hours a day, seven days a week. They attend roughly six hours of classes daily, and every classroom is jam-packed with hundreds of aspirants. Every two weeks, they give exams, and their scores are publicly ranked. Students don’t have time for friends or any kind of life outside of their studies. Top institutes such as Allen Career Institute and Aakash Institute even have cash rewards schemes for students appearing in competitive exams, often in an attempt to compete for coaching centre rankings.
PRESSURE IS PALPABLE
Abhigyan Kumar—a class 11 student and an IIT-JEE aspirant who is currently studying at a coaching centre in Kota—started a petition last month calling on authorities to take pressure off of the students in Kota. His petition has received over 4,000 signatures. Kumar turned down the request for an interview but in a write up for education website Careers 360, he said there’s a distinct apathy among older students in Kota towards the younger aspirants. One student, he recalls, was depressed due to his marks and didn’t come out of his room. “No one checked on him,” says Kumar. “Even among students, the awareness of mental health is extremely low. The environment is so competitive, some may even think that if more students die by suicide, there will be less competition. This is a toxic thought.”
The pressure is palpable, especially on the walls of a popular temple in the Talwandi area of Kota, where students from across India studying there, have scribbled their desperate prayers. “Make me billionaire, keep my family happy,” one reads, while another says, “Krishna ji, please stay with me, please keep my parents happy…please help me crack Neet 2024”. The temple priest, Pandit Radhe Shyam, told the media that he has to whitewash the walls every two weeks to make room for more such scribbles.
THE HYPE WITH CONSEQUENCES
The hype around Kota isn’t without reason. The city has produced the maximum number of selections for IITs and AIIMS over the decades. Neeraj Tripathi, 49, who took coaching lessons from Kota in the 2000s and went on to join IIT, tells The Established that the city’s coaching system is “miles ahead of any in the country”.
“Their infrastructure for teaching is excellent: They have counsellors and extra classes for those, especially from small towns and villages, who didn’t grow up with the same resources as others and mentorship. If the student wants to study, these institutes make sure they have everything,” explains Tripathi, who went on to work for NASA in New York after graduation.
Meanwhile, medical aspirant Singh adds to this point, saying that the mentorship system in Kota is strong, where students can opt to get personal mentorship in case they need an extra push. “In fact, we call mentors ‘papa’,” he shares. “Everything is so closely monitored. I chose to move away from Kota to study in my hometown due to health reasons, but a lot of discipline that I have right now is because of my time spent in Kota.”
The cracks in the system, however, started appearing years ago. Tripathi calls it the dark side of the endemic aspiration of Indians. “Our societal expectations when it comes to the idea of success is such that even if there’s no pressure from parents, the students feel it inevitably,” he says. In 2017, the number of deaths by suicide was 10. In 2018, it rose to 12, followed by eight in 2019, four in 2020, one in 2021, and 15 in 2022. This year, when the number reached 27—the highest in recent years—it drew attention to the long-standing faultlines in the system. In over a decade, the total number of deaths by suicide in Kota has crossed 100.
In August this year, news outlets reported that before he ended his life, 18-year-old student Manjot Singh told his friends he was “next in line” whenever the news of a suicide broke. In 2017, another student who died by suicide wrote a letter stating that the coaching pressures in Kota had instilled in her a deep sense of self-hate. In a letter she left behind before she took the extreme step, she urged government officials to shut these institutes. “They suck,” she wrote.
Aniruddha Malpani, an IVF specialist by profession and an angel investor who founded Apni Pathshala—a community-based alternate learning ecosystem—says one can’t put the blame on parents or the coaching institutions but look at the larger picture instead. “In India, education is perceived by a majority of people as a necessity to get jobs. That sets kids to the second order of consequences, which is to look at colleges, marks, etc. The entire approach to education is obsolete and outdated,” he tells The Established.
The deaths in Kota are “just the tip of the iceberg”, adds Malpani. “These kids are a part of a generation who are trapped and living lives of quiet desperation, partly because they don’t know any better,” he says. Malpani has prepared a petition to the government that demands limiting the class size in coaching institutions in order to give more attention to the students and offer a solution to the rising stress.
The administration in Kota has, over the years, taken steps to address the problem of suicides and the rising calls for mental health assistance. Since 2017, the Kota Hostel Association has been issuing mandates to install anti-hanging devices—which includes spring devices that detect load of more than 20 kilograms and uncoil immediately—in hostel and paying-guest rooms. Several are now installing “anti-suicide nets” in balconies and lobbies to make them “suicide proof.” Last year, a Kota hostel’s so-called solution to install iron grills below ceiling fans, sparked anger on social media. Malpani calls these self-regulations a “farce” that don’t address underlying problems.
THE WAY FORWARD
The unwillingness to acknowledge the rising stress also extends to parents. One coaching institute in Kota told PTI last year that out of over 50 parents they contacted to tell them their children were unable to keep up with the pressures of the exams, 40 of them refused to take them home.
The Kota administration has taken some steps in urging students to reach out to mental health facilitators. But Tripathi says the stigma around mental health still prevents many kids from seeking help. In 2015, Tripathi co-founded a wellness app called Onourem with his brother Nitin, which integrates science-based mental wellness activities with social engagement. Since the app’s launch, the brothers have introduced it to many colleges across India. This year, they brought it to Kota, when a leading coaching institute requested them to help some 20,000 students of theirs through their app.
The app, says Tripathi, always starts with a question “How are you feeling today?” “Kids can’t use the app unless they answer this question. We encourage them to write about it. It helps them to learn about their emotions,” he says. “But more than that, their inputs are being picked up by our AI model which, then, helps us see red flags, if any, and alert the institute.”
In 2022, the Rajasthan government proposed a draft law mandating counselling cells in each private coaching centre. Many institutions claim they have “wellness ventures” to address issues such as stress and depression. There’s no data to show how many mental health counsellors there are in Kota at the moment, or whether their counselling is even helping students.
“It’s easy for us to tell parents or coaching institutes how to handle stress,” adds Tripathi. “But perhaps we need to start scripting alternate stories of success that go beyond Kota.”
Published by: The Established
Reporter: Pallavi Pundir