Driven, To Death

Rampant student suicides over the years put life at Kota’s fabled coaching institutes for medical-engineering entrances under a cloud.

- Rohit Parihar

Nana (maternal grandfather) was right that studies are not for me... I had been very poor (in it).” This was Aman Gupta’s shocking assessment of his abilities, captured on a 10-minute mobile-phone video he shot on Kota’s Hanging Bridge on October 15. Moments later, the student from Bihar had jumped off, into the Chambal river below. On November 23, the body of Ashish Satyam, another 16-year-old from Bihar, was found on the riverbank. The IIT aspirant’s e-mail to a friend before he went missing is a tell-all: he was under extreme stress from studies and had decided to end his life. On December 1, Mahima Yadav, 17, from Haryana’s Rewari, hung herself at her rented home while her mother was away. Aman, Ashish, and Mahima are the latest fatalities in the exacerbating student suicides crisis plaguing Kota’s popular coaching institutes for engineering and medical entrances.

Kota shot to fame in the 1990s with its burgeoning coaching centres that almost guaranteed one a place in premier higher education addresses, such as IIT and AIIMS. These centres attract some 0.15 million students every year—a threefold jump since 2010— pumping approximately Rs 4,000 crore annually to the city’s economy. Today, that glory has given way to â€‹infamy: suicides have claimed 16 students so far in 2016. Last year, there were 17 deaths. Suicides took place in 2014 as well.