10k student suicides in ’18, highest in 10 yrs

Bengaluru: Twenty-eight students on an average committed suicide every 24 hours during 2018, according to a National Crime Records Bureau data analysis. The year’s figure, over 10,000, was the decade’s highest.

Of the 81,758 students who committed suicide from January 1, 2009 to December 31, 2018, 57% killed themselves in the past five years, including 10,159 in 2018, the data revealed.

Overall, India saw 1.3 lakh suicides in 2018, of which students made up 8%, almost the same as those involved in the farming sector, while 10% of them were unemployed people. A quarter of the student suicides in 2018 were because of “failure in exams”. Experts said causes ranged from drugs to depression, to broken families and breakups.


Sociologists and rights activists termed it a psycho-social problem.