“I am writing to you today not just as one of the 80 affected SC postgraduate medical students, but as an individual whose life is in imminent danger due to the systemic failures that your task force has been constituted to address.”
Thus began the testimony of a Dalit student from Gujarat in 2025 before the Supreme Court-appointed National Task Force (NTF), which was probing allegations of institutional discrimination on campuses, especially against marginalized communities. The student, who remained anonymous, alleged that payments had stopped in the last two years due to bureaucratic changes in the definition of his scholarship scheme, causing difficulties.
“For more than a year, my career has been forcibly suspended…My situation is a living example of how systemic indifference can make a student feel like ending their life is the only way out,” the email, seen by HT, said.
Unfortunately, this was not an isolated case. In its interim report, submitted to the Supreme Court in November 2025 and made public on Monday, the 18-member body flagged widespread discrimination in higher education institutions, weak grievance redressal mechanisms, academic pressure and serious gaps in mental health support.
The report states, “Student suicide represents the visible tip of a much larger iceberg of student crisis. Beneath the surface lies a broad spectrum of distress: suicidal attempts, ideation, passive death wishes, attempts at self-harm, serious mental health struggles, and experiences of discrimination or exclusion.”
Social and structural factors are at play
The panel found that student suicides are increasing despite a decline in the youth population, and called the trend a matter of “grave concern” requiring urgent institutional reforms.
The panel warned that interventions focused solely on mental illness would have limited impact without addressing the underlying “social, structural and institutional factors”.
The report said, “Student suicides reflect not only individual crisis, but also failure at institutional and systemic levels… However, if interventions are approached only from a mental health and illness perspective, their impact will be limited. A broader understanding is needed to recognize the role of social, structural and institutional factors.”
The task force was formed after the Supreme Court took cognizance of the deaths of two B.Tech students of IIT-Delhi – 21-year-old Anil Kumar, a Scheduled Tribe student, who died in July 2023, and 20-year-old Ayush Aashna, a Scheduled Caste student, who died in January 2024. Their families alleged caste-based discrimination, following which the top court ordered registration of FIR and formation of a task force in March 2025.
The 192-page report identified “small but significant patterns of suicide clusters” on higher education campuses, saying the student deaths were “just one manifestation of the crisis” and reflected broader institutional and social factors rather than isolated tragedies.
Based on media reports from January to August 2025, the NTF identified 210 student suicides. Stream-wise information was available for 198 cases, of which engineering students were responsible for 63 deaths, followed by medical students (47) and nursing students (16). The panel said that while engineering and medical students dominated the cases reported in the media, when enrollment data was looked at, suicides appeared disproportionately high among medical students.
Caste prejudice a stress factor
A large part of the report focuses on caste-based discrimination, which it describes as a major lens through which the social dimensions of student suicides in contemporary India have been understood.
The panel clearly stated that the general category students never raised the caste issue and added that caste bias did not exist in their institution. But Dalit and tribal students highlighted systemic and widespread discrimination, including by professors.
The report said, “Students discussed how despite scoring well in written exams they faced discrimination in oral assessments and professors insulted them for being “unworthy” because of admission through reservation. If they qualify in the general category, they are indirectly pressured to enroll on a reserved seat, as the administration asks them to sign an undertaking to give up reservation benefits if they choose a general seat.”
If they are politically active regarding caste discrimination, they are targeted and discriminated against by professors. Students reported that harassment by professors and supervisors led to suicide attempts, but these were completely suppressed by the university and the faculty members concerned were never held accountable. There was no history of student suicides at the institution, but one student felt that this subtle, lethal discrimination led to leaving school – not a loss of life, but certainly a loss of the academic future of marginalized students,” the report said.
The panel said the issue gained public prominence through cases such as that of research scholar Rohit 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 being accused of caste-based harassment and ragging. “Although a small number of cases have led to public campaigns by the likes of Rohit Vemula and Payal Tadvi, the majority remain unknown,” the report said.
Citing recent studies, the NTF said elite institutions often provide only a “mirage to mobility” to students from SC, ST and OBC communities. It states that “upper caste peers often question their qualifications, while faculty members dismiss academic struggles as a ‘lack of innate ability'”. The report said the “social mismatch” between faculty largely coming from socially advantaged groups and an increasingly diverse student body creates exclusionary environments and experiences of discrimination and “othering”.
It states, “Secondary literature on caste-based discrimination and its relationship to student suicides suggests that discriminatory practices have gone so far as to lead one student to end his life.”
Language was identified as another axis of discrimination. Limited English proficiency became the basis for segregation and discrimination in HEIs, where there was only English-medium pedagogy and an English-dominated social environment. For socially marginalized students, this has significantly reduced their self-esteem and sense of belonging,” the report said.
mental health support gap
The panel headed by Justice S Ravindra Bhat, a former Supreme Court judge, said consultations with stakeholders and a pan-India online survey revealed that student distress is often linked to a combination of academic, social, financial and institutional factors. Besides receiving responses from 2,119 HEIs, between August 8 and September 19 last year, the NTF held 30 meetings at 19 institutional sites in Delhi-NCR, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Assam and West Bengal.
Based on the responses, the panel found serious shortcomings in mental health support systems. Overall, 65% of institutions reported that they did not have access to mental health service providers, while 1,537 institutions (73%) lacked any full-time mental health professionals. Only 169 institutions (8%) reported having one full-time provider and 154 (7%) reported having two to five. Less than 20% had a formal link with nearby mental health services and less than 4% had a suicide-risk assessment and management protocol. More than 82% of institutions reported 50 or fewer new counseling registrations in a year, while 45% had not conducted faculty sensitization workshops on student mental health in the last 18 months.
The report cautioned that these findings were preliminary, based on a 3.5% response rate among 60,383 HEIs. It also recorded students’ concerns over discrimination based on caste, gender, disability, language and regional identity, inadequate support for first-generation learners, financial stress, rigid attendance rules, academic overload, poor hostel facilities and ineffective grievance mechanisms.
The NTF warned against “token 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-institution approach” that integrates governance, teaching practices, student support and campus culture.
In its recommendations, the panel called for a centralized mechanism to collect and analyze student suicide data, mandatory faculty training to identify at-risk students, stronger anti-discrimination measures, professional counseling services, clear crisis-response protocols, and stronger grievance-redressal systems.
A panel member told HT that work on the final report is ongoing and the survey closes in December 2025 after receiving responses from 16,750 HEIs. 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. The member said that NTF also conducted field visits to 29 institutions in nine states.
But it will be a long road ahead. As the panel found, grievance redressal mechanisms were broken or absent in most institutions, even for basic incidents like ragging, which is already illegal. Students told the panel that bureaucratic responses stifled their complaints and ultimately offered no solutions. “We go again and again,” said one student. “Unless we protest, nothing happens.”
