Kota suicides: The piteous tale of great expectations and hopelessness

In April 2016, a 17-year-old girl in Kota, Rajasthan, cracked the coveted IIT-JEE examination but committed suicide a day later as she did not want to pursue a career in engineering. Students ending their lives on failing to clear competitive exams has become a piece of routine news, but when a 17-year-old ends her life even after clearing an exam like IIT-JEE that has an acceptance rate of one percent, it provides a testimony to the trials and tribulations that lakhs of young boys and girls are enduring in meeting the family and societal expectations. “The world is what it is,” reads the opening sentence of VS Naipaul’s A Bend in the River. It adds, “Men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” The matter-of-fact tone of Naipaul’s assertion can be rejected for not acknowledging the interplay of those circumstances, that are beyond human control, in deciding failures and success in life. But the fact remains that the realisation of being “nothing” is an abyss that sucks all hope of bouncing back. The recent spate of suicides by students residing in Kota, Rajasthan, preparing for the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) and Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) meant for getting admission to India’s most prestigious engineering colleges including Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and medical colleges respectively, has once again ignited the debate as to what is pushing the young students to take such extreme steps. Recent data by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) tell a heart-wrenching tale of helplessness and hopelessness. According to the recent report published by the NCRB, the number of deaths by suicide by students saw an increase of 4.5 per cent in 2021. According to the report, 864 youngsters under the age of 18 committed suicide because of “failure in examination”. IIT entrance is one of the toughest exams in the world. In a recent report published by Erudera, an online education search platform, the IIT JEE exam has been ranked the toughest in India and the second toughest in the world. The report while highlighting the toughness of the exam states, “Acceptance rates at IITs is about 1 percent. The numbers speak for themselves, and if you consider the vastness of the syllabus and the unpredictability of the questions, the exam becomes among the toughest in the world.” It further adds, “With increased competition, the exam’s difficulty is also increasing yearly. Over 1.2 million candidates appear every year, for around 11,000 seats in 23 different IITs.” As the exam requires two long years of sustained hard work and preparation, the dream of getting into IITs gets consolidated in the process. However, the fact remains that with such a high level of difficulty, the chances of even the brightest minds being pruned out in the selection process are very common. While those who succeed are the winners, the failures are made to feel like losers for life. Anyone familiar with IIT entrance preparation or for that matter any competitive exam preparation would know that it is a game of handling pressure more than anything. First, there are brave ones who bear the pressure, are focused and determined, and eventually steer through the arduous preparation process and succeed. Then there are the less fortunate who bear the pressures, fail and move on. But there are those who fail to withstand the pressure and give up, sometimes the preparation, sometimes their lives. Abhayanand, former Director General of Police (DGP) of Bihar and founder of Super 30, an initiative spearheaded by him to coach students from economically weaker sections of society for the IIT entrance, while talking to Firstpost shared his views on this issue. He said, “It begins with peer pressure even before these students move to Kota or other places for coaching. This thinking that we have to do IIT and NEET at any cost and if we fail to do so life will be ruined is the genesis of the problem. Nobody is willing to test the capabilities, aptitude, and willingness to slog in these children. They are just pushed to follow the race.” He adds, “It is a fact that no coaching institute will ever tell any aspirant whether he or she is good enough to crack this exam or not. It all starts from here.” In a country with 1.3 billion people, with a sizeable population being youth, even using the word “cutthroat” to define the competition to grab a seat in a prestigious college will be a euphemism. It is like lakhs of Usain Bolt running for the same finishing line. It is ingrained in the minds of these young boys and girls from a very young age that if they fail to reach this finishing line on time, they will be reduced to “nothing” — a nobody. They are hardly made aware of the other games, where many counterparts of Usain Bolts are excelling. The parental and societal pressure coupled with the prestige that institutes like IITs have, it becomes natural for the youth to aspire for it. But the question that needs to be asked is whether these 17- and 18-year-olds can be left in this wilderness unaided, without making them realize that this is not the end of the world. It cannot be denied that cracking exams like the IIT entrance requires an altogether different level of sustained hard work and there is no substitute for it. But the parents need to understand that this willingness to work hard can be natural, can be cultivated, but can never be thrust upon. “Even if the child is willing to put in his best, the fact is that marks fluctuate a lot. There is no student who doesn’t get depressed. Those who are very bright are worried about their rank. For the ordinary one getting into the system is the big thing. There is no mechanism to check this creeping depression. In super 30 this depression is managed by the students themselves. All are friends, they know each other, and they console each other. The thing is that we have to ascertain if the aspirant is good or not and if he or she is not good enough to clear this particular exam, why are they being pushed to pursue it,” said Abhayanand. It needs to be understood that coaching institutes run on the business model. It is not per se an educational institution. They are training centres that are tasked with preparing the aspirants to crack these exams at any cost. Admission to these institutes is not even an indication, leave alone a guarantee for admission to IITs. The problem lies in the fact — as highlighted by Abhayanand, an IIT alumnus himself — that IITs and most of the other competitive exams have knowingly or unknowingly institutionalised the coaching system. Nobody can contest that the pattern of entrance exams requires one to train in a particular manner to crack the exam, which only formal coaching institutes can do. Perhaps understanding this problem, the New Education Policy (NEP) has focussed upon “regular formative assessment for learning rather than the summative assessment that encourages today’s ‘coaching culture”. Narayan Murthy, founder and chairman emeritus of Infosys in one of his speeches given in 2011 remarked that the quality of students entering IITs has deteriorated because of the coaching classes that prepare engineering aspirants. Murthy said that coaching classes teach aspirants limited sets of problems, out of which a few are asked in the examinations. As reported by The Times of India, he said, “They somehow get through the joint entrance examination. But their performance in IITs, at jobs, or when they come for higher education in institutes in the US is not as good as it used to be. This has to be corrected. A new method of selection of students to IITs has to be arrived at.” While coaching institutes are to an extent responsible for ignoring the mental health of students and pushing them to the abyss of depression through their unpardonable training regimes, they cannot be squarely blamed for what is failing the youth. The system needs to be held accountable for intentionally or unintentionally creating a selection process that necessities coaching institutes. The parents need to be put in the dock for putting so much pressure on their children without acknowledging their willingness and capability to bear this grind. And most importantly society needs to be questioned that celebrates success so loudly and sometimes in vulgar proportion as evident in life-size hoardings and billboards announcing the arrival of toppers after the result of any big competitive exam is declared be it of IIT, NEET, or of civil services, that those who fail are engulfed by a sense being nothing when compared to these super achievers. In the 1994 American film Shawshank Redemption, Tim Robbins who played the role of a banker sentenced to life in prison in 1947 for the murder of his wife and her lover tells his jail mate, “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.” The death of the young students failing a competitive exam is more than anything a death of hope; hope for a better tomorrow, hope for another chance. Hope for reclaiming oneself from the biggest failure. But when this very hope dies, Kota happens. The writer is a journalist and researcher based in Delhi. He has worked with The Indian Express, Firstpost, Governance Now, and Indic Collective. He writes on Law, Governance and Politics. Views expressed are personal. Read all the Latest News , Trending News , Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.