By News18,Poorvi Mishra

Copyright news18

You notice the student who drifts through the day like a ghost: skipping the cafeteria rush, avoiding group chats, scrolling alone at 2 a.m. From a distance, it looks like solitude. Up close, it is often a quiet signal that something is breaking inside.
The cost of ignoring those signals is stark. A recent multi-state survey shows that one in ten Indian students reported suicidal thoughts in the past year; more than five per cent attempted suicide, according to NCRB 2024 data. These are not just statistics; they are alarms.
Even our vocabulary shapes how we respond. To say someone “committed suicide” frames it as a crime. To say someone “died by suicide” reframes it as a human crisis. The difference matters. Prevention begins in language, which means blame must be replaced with empathy.
For students, empathy is not a lofty concept. It is survival. The rise in student suicides is not about isolated tragedies but about a neglected system. Each number represents silence: the stress that never found words, the loneliness that went unnoticed, the deadlines that grew heavier than grief. In a country where success is measured in ranks and placements, admitting struggle feels like betrayal.
And yet, campuses are slowly learning. Professors offering deadline extensions without judgement, administrators allowing mental health breaks, peers showing up for one another—these are quiet revolutions. Student-led counselling clubs, mentorship programmes, and buddy circles prove that even small, everyday gestures can tilt the balance away from despair and towards resilience.
Suicide prevention cannot be reduced to a helpline number on a noticeboard. It has to be built into the architecture of campus life: where reaching out is normal, struggle is not shameful, and a student’s value is never confined to grades.
The National Education Policy of 2020 attempts to acknowledge this. It calls for holistic and multidisciplinary approaches to student well-being, urging universities to embed counselling, mentorship, and socio-emotional learning into curricula. It envisions mentors who do more than guide academics—they also serve as emotional anchors.
The University Grants Commission followed in 2022 with guidelines requiring institutions to set up counselling centres, appoint trained counsellors, and implement mentor–mentee systems. It recommended buddy systems for peer support, mental health awareness in orientation weeks, and campuses that are inclusive and stigma-free.
On paper, this looks like a turning point. On the ground, the reality is uneven. Many universities still lack functioning counselling centres. Where they exist, one counsellor may serve thousands. Mentor–mentee systems often collapse into formality, with overworked faculty unable to provide meaningful care. Student Services Centres are underfunded or invisible. Suicide-prevention protocols rarely leave the policy document.
If empathy is to matter, it cannot be symbolic. It must be enforceable. That means setting minimum staffing norms instead of vague commitments, so that counsellor-to-student ratios are not left to chance. It means training mentors to recognise distress rather than just sign forms. It means creating Student Services Centres that are independently audited for quality and confidentiality. It means linking institutional rankings to mental health infrastructure, so a campus cannot score highly while neglecting its most vulnerable.
This is what it looks like to treat empathy as infrastructure. No longer optional, but as essential as Wi-Fi or electricity.
While policy drags, students themselves are modelling what works. Peer networks, safe spaces, and informal clubs succeed where institutions falter. Sometimes a simple message—“How are you, really?”—becomes a lifeline. Senior–junior mentoring, listening circles, and small acts of solidarity create more safety than official workshops that never leave the calendar.
Care begins in noticing. Withdrawal, missed meals, skipped classes are not just quirks but signals of distress. Responding early does not demand expertise, only attentiveness without judgement.
What India’s campuses need is a shift from survival to belonging. Belonging is not about transcripts or medals. It is the assurance that presence matters, that struggles are not invisible, that a campus is a community, not a pressure cooker.
Because in the end, it is not perfection or accolades that keep students alive. It is belonging.
Empathy, care, and connection are not extras. They are lifelines. They begin with listening more than speaking, understanding more than judging. Campuses do not need another glossy campaign; they need everyday systems that refuse to let students disappear into silence.
If empathy becomes infrastructure, then the student scrolling alone at midnight does not vanish unseen. She finds a community that notices, that listens, and that reminds her: you belong here.
Poorvi Mishra is Research Assistant at Action for Community Transformation (ACT) at Jindal School of Behavioural Sciences (JIBS), OPJGU. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.