Pressure to perform taking a toll on students

THE recent deaths by suicide of three teenaged students, who were preparing for entrance exams in Kota, Rajasthan, have stunned the nation. Two of them, Ankush and Ujjwal, were friends from Bihar and were staying in rooms next to each other. One was preparing for the engineering entrance exams, while the other was studying to crack the medical college entrance test. Both hanged themselves. The third student, Pranav from Madhya Pradesh, was preparing for the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (Undergraduate) or NEET — a pre-medical entrance test. He died after consuming a poisonous substance.

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Kota is known for coaching centres that provide preparatory classes for competitive engineering and medical examinations. About 1.5 lakh students, many from remote and small towns, live and study in around 100 private coaching institutions in Kota. Over the past few years, it has seen an alarming number of students’ deaths by suicide. This year, 14 students died by suicide in Kota. The last time there were so many deaths by suicide was in 2018, when 19 students died. In 2016, 17 students died by suicide. It is a recurring pattern.

The National Crime Records Bureau’s Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India Report, 2021, released in August this year, shows that over 13,000 students took their own lives in India last year. In fact, over the five-year period from 2016 to 2021, the number of student suicides in India has risen by 27 per cent. Maharashtra had the highest toll with 1,834 deaths, followed by Madhya Pradesh with 1,308, and Tamil Nadu with 1,246. According to the report, student suicides have been rising steadily for the last five years.

The deaths highlight the extreme pressure on students. The coaching centres in Kota, for example, are notorious for long class hours, many assignments and very competitive internal tests that determine whether a student is to be promoted to a ‘better batch’ with most sought-after teachers. Students have to perform well in order to qualify for the country’s best educational institutions. Many of the students are unable to cope with the intense curriculum because of the gaps in their basic education and the competence required to crack the competitive exams.

Moreover, the steep cost of these preparatory courses also acts as a burden on the students with parents shelling out between Rs 1.5 lakh and Rs 5 lakh a year. The fact that this fee, in many instances, has been arranged often with great difficulty, through loans or mortgaging of family property, puts tremendous pressure on the aspirants. As the Union Government has failed to improve the country’s educational infrastructure, exam-oriented coaching has become the norm.

Cashing in on the ‘hope for a better future’, coaching centres have emerged as one of the most lucrative ‘industries’ in the education sector. This is especially because education in India has been viewed as a gateway to employment and livelihood rather than to knowledge. Many students and their families dream of a coveted government job to escape the precarious social, caste and class predicaments they find themselves in.

The coaching centres have come under scrutiny earlier too. In 2015, the Rajasthan Government had established rules for coaching centres, mandating that they maintain a ‘stress-free’ environment, provide space for students to engage in leisure activities, and make sure that they get at least one day off per week. In addition, the government had instructed institutions to reduce their 200-student class size to no more than 80. In 2019, the state government had also set up a committee to suggest a legislation to regulate coaching centres and reduce students’ stress. The report of the committee, however, has not been revealed.

The need of the hour is to learn from past failures and address the growing crisis by taking urgent steps that involve all stakeholders — students, parents, teachers, institutes and policymakers. Scholars have long linked farmers’ suicides to India’s agrarian crisis; it is high time that civil society starts looking at students’ suicides as an indicator of a grave crisis of the country’s educational structure, including the institutional structure, curriculum and the government policies.

It is apparent that students from marginalised sections are pushed further to the margins through a number of factors such as the lack of English-medium education, private institutions charging high fee, poor quality education in government-run schools and institutions, ever-growing economic inequality, graduate students with inadequate skills and unable to secure jobs and caste discrimination.

Clearly, the combination of a large population of young people with rising aspirations and an economy with shrinking opportunities has created a public health crisis that requires urgent attention. The neo-liberal agenda keeps propagating the belief that it is not that hard to find success if one works hard enough, normalising the notion that the youth should blame themselves for their ‘failures’. All this while, the government continues to shirk its basic responsibility. It not only needs deeper introspection on structural aspects of the education system, but also needs to create employment and broaden the existing system to accommodate the youth. Educational reforms and the creation of employment will go a long way in solving this problem.

The government must take the initiative to set things right.