• Article includes why students commit Suicide, what to do when you are Alone in a Hostel Room, five Practical ideas that Students can practice, how Parents can guide children, what Educational Institutes/Government can do to reduce student suicides and what does Vedic psychology offer.

Earlier shared Why do CA students not commit suicide and Who is a Vedic Psychologist by author

Every year India loses more of its students to suicide. NCRB data shows the number rose about 80 per cent, from 8,068 in 2014 to 14,488 in 2024. When one of them is found in a Kota PG, an IIT hostel or a medical college room, the headlines ask what went wrong with the child.

Why students commit suicide?

As a Vedic Psychologist, here are four reasons- who failed the child, in this order:

1. Parents come first, because the pressure begins at home, and I say that with compassion: most parents I meet are frightened people doing their best.

2. Institute comes second, the coaching center that rents out a bed and a rank, and the IIT or AIIMS that takes in the survivor and grinds him further.

3. Government comes third, for writing rules that it does not enforce.

4. Public is fourth. It matters the most, because the power to change the other three sits with ordinary/capable citizens who decide what India celebrates and tolerates.

How CA studies compare with Kota module 

The Editor asked a question in article, ‘Why do CA students not commit SUICIDE like some KOTA coaching ones?’ is something every parent should sit with. CA students, even UPSC students face some of the country's most punishing exams, and yet they rarely break the way Kota aspirants do. His answer was practical w.r.t. CAs. Articles keeps the CA student inside real offices, mostly while living at home. 

Conversely, the Kota aspirant lives in a rented room with only a rank for company. The isolation is built in stages.

Three Rooms on the Way to a Rank

It starts at the kitchen table. Land is mortgaged, or a fixed deposit meant for a sister's wedding gets broken, and nobody says ‘you owe us’. Nobody has to. 

A fifteen-year-old overhears the sums being worked out after dinner and turns love into a debt payable in rank.

Then comes the PG room in Kota, Rajasthan that hosts lakhs of students.  

1. Sleep is the first thing to go.

2. The mess serves the same oily dal most days, the weekly test result reaches the batch WhatsApp group before the student has absorbed it himself,

3. Every evening call from home opens with ‘Test kaisa gaya?’ 

Within months, he becomes a roll number with a percentile attached.

The last room is the one everyone assumes is safe: a hostel at an IIT, an AIIMS or any top medical college. The student who topped a Kota batch now sits among hundreds who topped theirs. The student gets a reality check because all students are equally if not brighter.

1. At an IIT, relative grading guarantees someone finishes last.

2. At a medical college, the internal exams never stop, the syllabus never shrinks, and some seniors still confuse humiliation with training.

3. Add a backlog, a harsh professor and a disciplinary hearing that treats a frightened twenty-year-old as a file, and the perfectionism that won the seat turns on its owner.

As a Vedic Psychologist, how can I help?

What to Do When You Are Alone in That Room – I teach five things. 

Posters in coaching institutes say ‘stay positive’, ‘talk to someone’. At two in the morning, heart hammering, mind narrowed to one exit, a poster does nothing. What works is whatever your body rehearsed while it was calm. Vedic psychology has always worked this way, through practice before crisis.

1. Sattvāvajaya, for the spiral. Charaka defines it as ahitebhyo arthebhyo mano-nigrahaḥ, pulling the mind back from what harms it, and I take that literally.

a. Get your body out of the room and go wherever another human being is: the mess, the corridor, the guard's desk. 

b. Put anything you could hurt yourself with out of reach, or hand it to a friend.

c. Press your palms together hard, feel your feet on the floor, and breathe in for four counts and out for eight, ten times.

Then call one of three names you pinned to the top of your phone on a calm day. If nobody answers, dial Tele-MANAS on 14416.

While you are well, set one line as your lock screen: Nothing final tonight. First, I call. The acute wave passes, and your only job is to be there when it does.

2. Sound and form - Take one mantra from home, the one your grandmother used, and repeat it 108 times on a mala or your finger joints, one repetition per out-breath. On heavy evenings, lie down for fifteen minutes with a slow ālāp in Rāga Yaman, no lyrics.

Draw a dot inside a circle, stick it at eye level above your desk, and rest your gaze on it for five minutes before you study. This is TRATAKA, and it trains the same attention the exam demands. It won't stop the ragging, though it gives a flooded nervous system one steady thing to hold while you get help for the rest.

3. A Peer Rescue Circle

a. Plenty of students will never walk into an admin office, some for good reason, so begin in your own wing. Six to eight friends, one hour every evening for two weeks.

b. Spend the first week learning the signs of tamasic collapse: skipping the mess, staying in bed through classes, going silent, giving belongings away.

c. Practise asking the plain question, "Are you thinking of ending your life?" Asking does not put the idea in anyone's head, and most people are relieved that someone finally asked. 

d. Spend the second week rehearsing what follows: stay, listen without lecturing, never promise secrecy, and walk your friend to the counsellor yourself.

e. Under the Supreme Court's guidelines, every institution with a hundred or more students must engage at least one qualified counsellor or psychologist, so use that right. 

Students, wardens and parents who want formal training can get certified in this two-week program at Manoloka Holistic Wellness, the practice I run.

4. Inoculation before leaving home - Before a child joins Kota, an IIT or a medical college, the family rehearses the worst result out loud, with a concrete plan for what happens next. The student writes down who he is apart from the exam: elder brother, left-arm spinner, the one who fixes everyone's phone. 

Agree on sleep and weekly sport as non-negotiables, and let the parent check on those instead of marks.

5. Adhikāra, your fitness for a particular path - For one month, keep two columns: work that makes you lose track of time, and work you dread even after good sleep. If timed abstract problem-solving lives permanently in the second column, you have learned something real about your aptitude.

The CA students the Editor wrote about found their path that way, and so have designers, lawyers and teachers who changed course at nineteen.

What That Log Shows that a Rank List Cannot?

A test series measures speed and accuracy on one kind of problem under a timer. When I assess a student, I look at eleven facets of sāmarthya, or capability.

Half concern how the mind works:

1. Ekāgratā, sharp focus, differs from dhāraṇā, holding that focus for three hours.

2. A student with strong smṛti recalls any formula and may still lack medhā, the grasp that joins formulas into understanding.

3. Buddhi-viveka is knowing which question to leave alone; manana-śakti is catching your own thinking and correcting it.

4. Citta-saṁskāra means the old grooves, like a teacher who humiliated you in class five, and dhṛti is how fast you get up after a fall.

The other half concern behavior:

5. indriya-niyantraṇa (these days, mostly who controls whom between student and phone),

6. saṅkalpa-śakti or willpower, the balance of sattva, rajas and tamas,

7. svādhyāya or self-study,

8. vāk-śakti or articulation,

9. paṭhana-kauśala or reading speed and comprehension,

10. anukūla-buddhi or adaptability, and

11. utsāha, the appetite to begin again.

Before any of this, I look at the body. Deranged vāta shows up as anxiety, scattered attention and broken sleep. Months of mess food weaken agni, the digestive fire, and a heavy gut makes a slow mind. Chronic nidrā debt can pass for low intelligence.

Sleep and food are decided at home long before they are settled in a hostel, which is why the first failure I named belongs to parents.

To Parents, From a Son Whose Parents Got It Right

Every Indian child knows the scripts. ‘Acche se padhna’, ‘Acche bacche acche marks laate hain’, ‘Humara kya izzat rahega’. And lurking behind them, the neighbour’s son with his 98 per cent. Parents say these things out of fear. 

My parents never said them. They never forced a stream on me and never made my marks the centre of our house.

I was stubborn regardless, and I ran away even with more than their best laid out in front of me. Many families would have given up. Mine kept trying, steering me toward a path I could actually walk, one that would let me manage on my own after they are gone. That is what any parent wants. There was a stretch of my life when dark thoughts kept me company every day. I still lean on my parents, on my younger brother and on the wider circle around me for nearly everything, and I am stronger for it. They, and then my community, are the reason I am alive. Today I sit with young people who carry those same thoughts, and Vedic psychology is how I help them find their feet.

1. What Parents must do can be learnt?

Put your energy into the capacities that produce marks. Smṛti-abhyāsa, memory training through recitation, association and spaced revision, can happen at the dinner table. Twenty minutes of reading together each day raises reading speed. Sleep, sunlight, home food and play are yours to protect. And learn your child's prakṛti. A vāta child thinks in bursts and tires fast; a pitta child competes fiercely and burns out; a kapha child learns slowly and forgets almost nothing. Each needs a different pace, so ask how they slept before you ask how the test went. Once the child leaves home, though, that care passes to an institute, and most institutes are failing at it.

Read   Yoga based Memory practices for students and professionals

2. When the Institute Takes Over

I want consequences with teeth. When a student at an IIT, an AIIMS or any premier college dies after coercive disciplinary handling, an independent inquiry should publish its findings, the institute should lose its NIRF standing for that cycle, and the officials who ran the process should answer personally. Rankings count whether students leave alive.

Every IIT, every medical college and every large coaching campus should house a Vedic psychology lab alongside its psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, under one roof, so walking in carries no stigma.

There, students meet the Itihāsa as working stories: Arjuna sinking down in his chariot with the bow slipping from his hands, and rising after one long conversation. Add music and art therapy, yoga, and an Ayurvedic clinic that treats sleep and digestion with the seriousness usually reserved for grades. Institutes will build these only when someone makes them, and that job belongs to the government.

3. Where the Government Keeps Looking Away

In July 2025, the Supreme Court issued fifteen binding guidelines to prevent student suicides. Its National Task Force then surveyed higher education institutions, and despite repeated deadline extensions, only 3.5 percent of them responded. That number tells you how seriously the matter is taken inside the gates, and how little anyone expects to be checked.

Meanwhile Kota is filling up again, with early trends showing a 20 to 30 per cent rise in enrolments for the 2026–27 session. Before those batches settle in, coaching centres should meet legally enforceable minimums on sleep, food and daily exercise, backed by inspections, and centres that fail should stay shut until they comply. 

The state should also recognise Vedic psychology and Ayurveda as complementary care working with psychiatric treatment, so families who distrust medicine still find help they will accept. Governments act on what voters demand, which brings me to the failure that matters most.

4. Finally, the Rest of Us

Every coaching hoarding with a topper's face on it exists because we look at it with admiration. Every family WhatsApp group that forwards a cousin's rank and never asks about his sleep feeds the same machine. The public holds the most power here because it holds the future: tomorrow's parents, today's voters, the alumni who fund IITs and the donors who build hostels. Ask your local coaching centre about its sleep and food standards before you ask about its selections. When a student dies, stay with the story past the first day and ask what the inquiry found.

Take the trouble to learn what Vedic psychology offers

It is a psychology of the mind drawn from Charaka, Patañjali and the Itihāsa, practiced alongside modern clinical care, and close to the way our grandparents once steadied a frightened child. It deserves a place in every Indian family's vocabulary, the way yoga has earned one.

My family gave me second chances until one of them held. No student's survival should depend on having a family like mine.

If you or someone you know is struggling, call Tele-MANAS on 14416. It is free and open round the clock.

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Author Sri Prabhav Paturi       is a Business Strategist and Executive Coach, renowned for developing the Vedic Psychology modality. Ordained by his Guru Parampara, he leads Vyoma Bindu Akhada, spreading Hindu Dharma through Aghora Tantra and Yoga, while offering free spiritual guidance. In addition, he collaborates with companies like Blue Capuchin, Brahman Studios, and Manoloka Holistic Wellness Clinic. Passionate about blending ancient wisdom with modern solutions, he aims to create a sustainable ecosystem where Dharma and modernity coexist.

Also read

1. How Yoga can help you manage Stress

2.  What is Trataka

3. Yoga based practices to boost Memory by Dr Natesh Babu of S-Vyasa University