Media365
4 min readOct 8, 2026 04:27 PM IST
First published on: Oct 8, 2026 at 04:26 PM IST
World Mental Health Day falls on October 10. There will be helpline numbers, awareness posts, wellness webinars. Set that against what we did, a few weeks earlier, to a 22-year-old. Sahil Wakode, a second-year BTech student at IIT-Bombay, died by suicide on September 18, hours after an examination. Within days of his death — long before any inquiry could conclude — exam-hall CCTV was circulating online and on various television channels as proof he had been caught with a phone; his last calls became content for strangers to pick over. His father alleges caste discrimination and named a faculty member in an FIR; the institute denies any of it drove him to his death.
Notice what the argument is always about. Not whether a young person should be dead but which single story owns the death. The institute thrives on academic stress; the activists need caste, the pattern they have watched kill before. The hunt for a single, assignable cause is not a search for the truth but a way of not having one. A death reduced to one villain — a professor, a phone, a father’s ambition — is a death no one has to think too hard about.
We are told each time that India has no rules for reporting a death like this. We do. The Press Council’s 2019 guidelines, issued under the Mental Healthcare Act, bar what happened after the Mumbai incident. Every line was crossed. The Supreme Court has laid down pan-India guidelines on student suicide and appointed a national task force on student mental health. In January, it was still flagging the “tokenistic compliance” and “institutional apathy” that met its orders. The language usually used to speak of such deaths gives the game away too. “Committed suicide” — the phrase almost everyone still reaches for — is the vocabulary of crime. Parliament removed suicide from that category in 2017, when the Mental Healthcare Act decriminalised the attempt. A person does not commit suicide. A person dies by suicide.
NCRB’s Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India recorded 14,488 student suicides in 2024 — the highest it has ever logged, close to double the figure of a decade earlier, and roughly 1.24 lakh students lost across 2014 to 2024. The deaths cluster where the pressure is highest: The coaching towns, the entrance-exam hubs, institutions. These are not private misfortunes. They are a structural output, arriving in larger numbers every year.
Which forces the question the ritual of blame avoids: Why does a single entrance result still stand in for the whole of a young life? When the resulting pressure produces cheating, we consider it a defect of character rather than the predictable behaviour of people held underwater. And the responsibility does not stop at the institution’s gate. It reaches the families who stake a child’s entire worth on a rank. It reaches a media that converts grief into traffic. Whether a professor discriminated is a fair question; so is whether the institute reached too quickly — as it has before — for “academic pressure” the moment caste was named. But those sit inside a larger question no FIR will cover: What kind of system produces the death, and then the spectacle around it?
Which brings us back to World Mental Health Day that insists on one idea: These deaths are not fated. They happen because of choices we make, and we can choose differently. Prevention that begins only after the student is dead is not prevention. It is absolution, too late to be of use to the person it names.
The writer, a public health and policy professional, is a former director at NITI Aayog
