For student well-being, rethink the campus, not just the student

Why in the News

Recent deaths of students at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi and IIT Bombay have reopened the question of what an educational institution owes students beyond teaching and evaluation. IIT Delhi has constituted an external inquiry committee. The IIT Bombay director has said a committee would examine the death and students’ concerns about representation and support services. Campus well being is treated as a clinical matter outsourced to counsellors and therapists, while the rules, hierarchies, evaluation systems and grievance procedures that shape daily campus life stay unexamined. The World Health Organization (WHO) places mental health inside social, economic and physical environments, and the 2026 interim report of India’s National Task Force on Student Mental Health and Suicide Prevention ties student well being to academic pressure, discrimination, financial hardship, institutional culture, distrust and faculty preparedness. What is contested is whether universities are willing to examine the conditions they themselves create.

Why does a counselling first and skills first model fall short?

1. Limits of the medical analogy: A medicine acts on a biological process while the surrounding social situation stays unchanged, so the analogy cannot carry a complete theory of well being.
2. Distress relocated inside the student: Once professional services become the institution’s primary measure of well being, the university presents itself as a neutral background to the student’s private difficulty.
3. Counselling cannot remove the pressure: Students negotiate academic overload, discrimination, poor hostel infrastructure, career anxiety and unresponsive administration, and counselling helps a student respond to these rather than removing them.
4. Well being reframed as a personal skill: Time management, emotion regulation, sleep, exercise and resilience are presented as capacities students must acquire on their own.
5. Where the skills stop working: Time management cannot solve an impossible workload, mindfulness cannot make an opaque grading system transparent, and positive thinking cannot make a compromised grievance process trustworthy.

What institutional conditions actually shape student well-being?

1. The ordinary machinery of the campus: Rules, hierarchies, classrooms, hostels, evaluation systems, grievance procedures and the everyday exercise of authority determine how people live on a campus.
2. Discipline as the organising idea: Educational experience remains shaped by discipline and steep hierarchies rather than by freedom, equity, trust and empathy.
3. Dissent read as misconduct: A student who dissents is liable to be labelled as indiscipline, political activism or disrespect.
4. The decisions that settle the question: Whether a student can question a grade, disagree with a supervisor, express dissent, protest, or take part in decision making is what an institution’s well being claim rests on.
5. Faculty and administrators hold the lever: Ensuring student well being is a shared responsibility of faculty and administrators, and it is routinely overlooked in practice.

How do authoritative frameworks locate the causes of student distress?

1. WHO framing: Mental health sits within social, economic and physical environments, and prevention must address individual, social and structural determinants together.
2. National Task Force finding: The 2026 interim report connects student well being with academic pressure, discrimination, financial hardship, institutional culture, distrust and faculty preparedness.
3. Convergence of the two: Both place the causes outside the individual student, which is the opposite of where campus practice places them.
4. Existing guidance is already sufficient: Indian higher education carries enough guidelines to know that student well being cannot be separated from academic pressure and institutional culture.

Where does the university’s model of authority contradict itself?

1. Adults for obligation, children for voice: Students are treated as adults when fees, performance and responsibility are demanded, and as children when autonomy, voice or due process become inconvenient.
2. Care language over paternal authority: The deeper problem appears where universities speak the language of care while retaining a paternal model of authority.
3. Harshness defended as formation: Harshness is justified as character building, and obedience is conflated with respect.
4. Asymmetric reciprocity: The vocabulary of the guru shishya relationship is misused once reciprocity disappears, so respect moves upward while correction and anger move downward.
5. Forms the distress takes: Public shaming, arbitrary penalties, exclusion from opportunities, hostile communication and the use of evaluation to settle interpersonal conflict make the educational experience itself distressing.

What would a well-being test for the classroom look like?

1. Teaching is not outside the policy: Administrators and faculty commonly assume well being policy begins outside the classroom, as though teaching and evaluation do not bear on it.
2. The operative test: A classroom passes where students are empowered to ask for reasons, admit uncertainty, make a mistake and disagree with a teacher.
3. Protection after speaking: The same test requires that students can criticise or protest the administration and report unfair treatment without expecting retaliation.
4. Scope of the claim: Universities cannot eliminate every source of suffering, students are not always right, and academic standards are not abandoned whenever conflict appears.

What institutional redesign is proposed?

1. Students as rights bearing adults: Students should be active participants in institutional governance rather than being confined to ornamental roles.
2. Governance membership: Alumni and students should be part of the governance framework through board membership.
3. Role specific training: Faculty and student affairs teams need training to recognise distress, protect confidentiality, respond without humiliating, understand bias and follow crisis protocols, and to accept that differences of opinion are students’ rights.
4. Disciplinary process redesigned: A high stress disciplinary encounter should open with a humane conversation setting out the institutional support available, followed by further conversations rather than a single performative step.
5. An annual well being audit: Universities must be willing to undergo an annual student well being audit, and a few principles matter more than a long list of initiatives.

Challenges to institutional reform on student well-being

1. Professional capacity is missing: An institutional model still needs trained counsellors at the point of crisis, and the national supply is far below requirement. Eg. India has about 0.75 psychiatrists per 100,000 people against the WHO norm of 3 per 100,000.
   The Fix: Tie a fixed counsellor to student ratio and an in house student wellness team to accreditation, so capacity is a condition of approval rather than a discretionary spend.
2. Grievance machinery exists without trust: A redress body that students do not believe in produces silence rather than complaints, and silence is read by the institution as the absence of a problem. Eg. The University Grants Commission (Redressal of Grievances of Students) Regulations, 2023 require every higher educational institution to appoint an ombudsperson.
   The Fix: Publish anonymised annual data on grievances filed, timelines and outcomes, so disposal is visible rather than asserted.
3. Discrimination is embedded in supervision and hostel life: Bias in supervision, allocation and everyday campus life falls on specific groups and shows up as dropout rather than as a complaint. Eg. High dropout at postgraduate and doctoral levels has been attributed to institutional bias, as argued after the Rohith Vemula case at the University of Hyderabad.
   The Fix: Give equal opportunity cells a reporting line to the governing board rather than to the administration they are meant to examine.
4. Evaluation doubles as an instrument of authority: Discretionary grading and supervisory control over a thesis timeline give a single individual decisive power over a student’s future. Eg. Doctoral progression in most Indian universities rests on a single supervisor’s recommendation with no standing appeal route.
   The Fix: Mandate published grading rubrics and a second examiner appeal route for both coursework and doctoral progress reviews.
5. Well being carries no measurable accountability: Nothing currently attaches an institutional consequence to a campus that produces distress, so reform stays voluntary. Eg. The Supreme Court in the Sukdeb Saha case recognised mental health as part of the right to life under Article 21.
   The Fix: Fold the annual well being audit score into National Assessment and Accreditation Council grading, so the audit carries a funding and reputational consequence.

Conclusion

Indian higher education has never lacked the diagnosis. What it lacks is any willingness to accept that the conditions producing student distress are its own design choices about authority, evaluation and voice. Treating counselling as the answer keeps those choices out of scrutiny at the exact point they are most visible. The marker to watch is whether the National Task Force’s final report converts its findings into audited institutional obligations rather than another set of advisory guidelines.

Student mental health in India

1. Scale of the system: India runs the world’s second largest higher education system, with total enrolment estimated at 4.65 crore in 2026 against 3.42 crore in 2014-15.
2. Suicide burden: India accounts for nearly one third of global suicides, and suicide is the leading cause of death in the 15 to 29 age group.
3. Treatment gap: The treatment gap for common mental disorders runs between 70 and 90 per cent, and under 1.5 per cent of the health budget goes to mental health.
4. Statutory footing: The Mental Healthcare Act, 2017 replaced the 1987 law, created a right to mental healthcare and decriminalised attempted suicide.

Government Initiatives on student and youth mental health

1. Manodarpan: A Ministry of Education initiative carrying advisory guidelines for students, teachers and faculty, a national database of counsellors, a toll free helpline and a handbook on psychosocial support.
2. Tele MANAS and Kiran: Tele MANAS provides a round the clock tele mental health service through State cells, and Kiran is a toll free helpline for people in psychological distress.
3. National Suicide Prevention Strategy, 2022: The first national strategy of its kind, targeting a 10 per cent reduction in suicide mortality by 2030.
4. District Mental Health Programme: Operating under the National Mental Health Programme, it delivers counselling, outpatient care, suicide prevention and ten bedded inpatient facilities at the district level.

Back2Basics: National Task Force on Student Mental Health and Suicide Prevention

1. Origin: It was constituted by the Supreme Court in 2025 to examine the causes of student suicides in higher educational institutions.
2. Composition: It is chaired by a former judge of the Supreme Court and includes mental health professionals and academic administrators.
3. Mandate: It is required to identify gaps in the mental health support available on campuses and recommend preventive and remedial measures.
4. Status: It released an interim report in 2026, and its recommendations are to inform binding directions to higher educational institutions.

Matching Previous Year Question

“[2014, GS2, 12.5 marks] Should the premier institutes like IITs/IIMs be allowed to retain premier status, allowed more academic independence in designing courses and also decide mode/criteria of selection of students. Discuss in light of the growing challenges.”