What's the article about?
- It talks about the rising trend of suicides in higher education institutes in India, especially in the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the National Institutes of Technology (NITs).
Relevance:
- GS2: Issues Relating to Development and Management of Social Sector/Services relating to Health, Education, Human Resources;
- Essay
Context:
- There is a rising trend of suicides by students in higher education institutes in India.
- During the 2018–23 quinquennial, 61 students (33 in IITs, 24 in NITs, and 4 in IIM) ended their lives.
- In the 2014-21 septennial, there were 122 cases in various higher education institutions.
- In both cohorts, most students were from the Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST), Other Backward Castes (OBC) and Economically Weaker Sections (EWS).
Analysis:
- What are the possible causes for this rising trend?
- Rise of nuclear families and dwindling family support:
- Nuclear families with both working parents are unable to provide the kind of parenting and mentoring that joint families provide.
- Individualism is all pervasive in society. Consequently, early signs of emotional distress go unnoticed, unrecognised, and unaddressed.
- Students in emotional distress have at times been advised to spend time with their families.
- Professional nature in institutions of higher education:
- There is hardly any free and fair communication between students, their seniors, teachers, and the administration.
- Classroom interactions are confined to academics, with recurrent exhortations to students to be committed, dedicated and hard working, adding to the stress emotionally distressed students are already under.
- Consequently, students are deprived of much-needed preventive measures. It is only when tragedy occurs that actions are triggered — an inquiry and then a prescription of remedial and preventive measures.
- Rise of nuclear families and dwindling family support:
- Steps taken to prevent suicides:
- There are formal mechanisms in place to provide personal, cultural and psychological counselling to students. Most of the IITs, NITs and the like have put in place (or beginning to) online and offline mechanisms to access personal counselling and therapies in a confidential manner.
- Apps such as Dost, Saathi, and Mitr have also been launched to access their services anonymously. Most of these institutions also organise awareness and sensitisation programmes for students.
- But the major limitations of these efforts are that the onus is on the students ‘in need’ to seek help; it is they who must seek an appointment. This often led to delays in the help.
- Systems around the world:
- Universities in the United States have dedicated counselling centres with a range of psychological services such as evaluation, counselling, consultation, and therapies — individual and group.
- They are accredited by the International Accreditation of Counseling Services (IACS) and are manned by licensed psychologists, psychiatrists, clinical therapists, mental health workers and social workers.
- The counsellor-to-student ratio is carefully established through a combination of empirical analysis and judgments of experienced counselling directors.
Way Forward:
- Most campus suicides are attributed to academic pressure, family circumstances, personal reasons, different kinds of stress, financial distress, caste-based discrimination, and many different forms of harassment.
- Many of the sources of distress lie outside the purview of higher education institutions and have their genesis in the larger economic and societal contexts.
- Therefore, each of these reasons must need to be addressed at their source by the government, society, institutions, parents, and families.
