ON A WINTER EVENING in January 2024, Amruta, a student of National Law University (‘NLU’) Delhi, and I were discussing our respective experiences in NLUs - India’s premier semi-autonomous public law schools, considered the zenith of legal education by India’s institutional ranking frameworks. “Islands of excellence,” the ex-prime minister Manmohan Singh had said about them in 2007, “in a sea of mediocrity."
For a brief duration in my life in 2023, I was a student in Hidayatullah National Law University, Raipur. That time had not felt so brief at all - I had experienced trolling, eye-rolls, felt the toxic competitiveness that permeated the atmosphere (at one point, a student had asked me to leave the University as I did not belong there). I had scraped through only two months of law school in Raipur when a final year student - Urvi Bhardwaj - took her own life on that campus.
For a long time after, many of us would wake up to students in our hostel going through panic attacks, emotional meltdowns, and distress. The college administration, on the other hand, started visiting every student’s room each morning to ensure that everyone was “safe”. As the usual, bare minimum protocol, but perhaps with the misunderstanding that it was something profound, the administration plastered the contact information of the college psychologist everywhere. My friends would often tell me how they felt surveilled, and how no constructive steps were taken by the University to ensure the health of students.
Urvi’s passing moved something inside me. The apathy towards students that followed felt like the final nail in the coffin.
Urvi’s passing moved something inside me. The apathy towards students that followed felt like the final nail in the coffin. I knew I had to leave; thankfully, I did leave, shortly later. Even as I left the campus, I knew that it would take me a long time to process my months there. When I was back at home in Delhi, I met Amruta. On talking to her, I realized that this was not simply the story of one NLU – there were larger, systematic lapses at play. Amruta told me that she was also constantly bullied, faced casteism and discriminatory treatment by students and professors alike, and felt like she did not belong there.
I remember being on a bus ride with her, sharing poetry, laughing at how students at our colleges bullied us for having “naive interests.” One thing stood out as common between us: ‘We did not even want to belong’. Both of us wanted to belong to fairer, more inclusionary, healthier spaces.
On September 4, 2024, Amruta died of suicide within the premise of NLU, Delhi.
The college administration was particularly aware of Amruta’s mental health condition, certain sources informed me, even prior to this incident. Tragically, not much long after we lost Amruta, two first year students - Khushil and Shreyasi - passed away. This meant that NLU Delhi had witnessed the death of three students in a month, all three of whom were less than twenty years old.
I had met Amruta at a particularly turbulent time in her life. She would tell me about extending solidarity to SevenAngryWomen, a student-led collective in college that spoke out against incidents of gendered harassment against both students and faculty. Her friend, Sufiya*, told me that Amruta’s contact information was leaked, she started receiving threats, and thereafter, a student accused of sexual harassment issued a complaint against her to the Proctor of the University. This incident, exacerbated with academic stress, caused a lot of worry and trauma to Amruta. She faced administrative repercussions, for she had not belonged.
To belong or not to belong in NLUs
There is a long list of criteria to feel that you belong to an NLU: fluent, legalese English, toxic competitiveness, a pro-administration attitude, a commitment to join Tier-1 corporate law firms, caste-class privilege, and so on. The fee structure, amounting to roughly Rs 2 lakh per annum in every NLU (and about Rs 3.2 lakh per annum in NLU Delhi), speaks to the same. This is also reflected in the student composition in National Law Universities – for instance, the IDIA survey report (2020-21) disclosed that NLUs suffer from a skewed gender ratio, with an under-representation of marginalized students. The survey, conducted across five leading NLUs, reported that 51.4 percent of students had an annual income of Rs 10 lakh or above, with only 3.59 percent of students hailing from a rural background. These statistics – albeit outdated – point towards the stark inequality in the student composition within NLUs, depicting a possible cause for the worrying trend of deprecating mental health in these universities.
Conversations with students from NLUs indicate a worrying trend about the deprecating physical and mental health conditions of students, thus marking the blueprint for the increase in cases of suicide within law schools.
During my time at HNLU, I would often talk to Zahid, a student at National Law School of India University, Bengaluru. Around November 2023, on asking about his health, he shared that his days and nights would blur into an unending moment of stress. He told me, “Everyone is bad, there is no other way to put it. You barely get any recreational time to sleep, eat or rest – and this is viewed as a sort of “‘academic rigour’.” There are mental health professionals present on campus, but this is an institutional problem.”
A few months later, on March 21, 2024, Dhruv Thakkar, just into his first year, died by suicide. At that time, I had the opportunity to speak to Anjana*, a student from NLSIU and Dhruv’s junior, who told me that they could not get a breather, with classes resuming and submission deadlines approaching almost immediately after. Amidst general apathy, the tenuous schedule in NLSIU also ensured that there was no truthful conversation about Dhruv’s passing, no opportunity for the students to process or reflect upon the loss. However, a few students did come together in the aftermath, forming the NLS Mental Health Support Group, which is currently formulating an official Mental Health policy for their college. Another student at NLSIU, Rahul*, noted that the institutional gaps still persist, even though NLSIU has collaborated with external mental health organizations. Hence, significant work is required to address these concerns effectively.
Anjana explained that there were other institutional problems — there exists only two counselors even as batch size has increased each year since her joining that year (currently 1500 students are enrolled at NLSIU). As of February 2026, the student-led Mental Health Support group has sent emails to the administration highlighting the concerns of their overwhelming academic evaluation schedule. While they currently engage with both students and the administration, a Mental Health Policy is yet to be released by the student group.
Negligence, unresponsive facilities, “no academic relaxations”
In the same year of Dhruv’s passing, in 2024, NLUs in Gujarat and Kerala also witnessed cases of suicide. In National University of Advanced Legal Studies, Kochi, a third-year student, Athul went missing. One day later, his body was discovered from a bridge 6 km away from his campus. Sahil*, his batchmate, told me that Athul had been asked to leave the hostel under suspicious circumstances, and was living with his relative nearby. Sahil explained that Athul’s worsening mental health was a rather common knowledge in law school. However, the administration had neglected his well being. During our conversation, Sahil kept telling me that there are different accounts to the incident which the authorities keep covering up. “They had introduced a counselor recently, but I haven’t heard about or seen them…[it] looks like that attempt went nowhere”, he said.
“Everyone is bad, there is no other way to put it. You barely get any recreational time to sleep, eat or rest – and this is viewed as a sort of ‘academic rigour’.”
Similarly, there were traces of negligence and unaccountability in Gujarat National Law University as well: a third-year student, Vansh, ended his life in his hostel room on March 17, 2025. His family told The Indian Express that they would resort to legal options to fight for the truth behind Vansh’s death. Administrative negligence stood clear, as one of his friends informed The Print that “there was no ambulance, warden, nurse, or even a first-aid kit available for immediate medical attention.”
Perhaps due to the student protests that followed Vansh’s death, there exists relatively more information on what went behind the scenes – the University “acknowledged certain shortcomings” behind his death and realized the need for a student body to address their collective concerns. The University was also forced to suspend their warden and nurse after the students demanded an action over their “administrative failure.”
Similarly, after Sahastranshu Pandey’s passing on September 21, 2025 in National Academy of Legal Studies and Research (‘NALSAR’), Hyderabad, it came to attention that the medical facilities at the University were “unable to respond effectively and was unwilling to rush to the situation and administer critical emergency care.” This incident prompted me to inquire whether the University was equipped to deal with the aftermath of a student death on campus.
Hence, in February 2026, I had a conversation with Mala, a student in NALSAR. She told me that the University lacks health infrastructure of all kinds – “there were no academic relaxations before or after his passing. The administration has always stayed hostile and rude towards the students.” Specifically in the context of mental health, she noted, “The administration often tells students struggling with mental health to leave NALSAR. Some professors have also hinted at how some of us don’t deserve to be in this University.”
In a detailed questionnaire sent to NALSAR earlier this month, vice chancellor Srikrishna Deva Rao stated that NALSAR had a “health centre with doctors and nurses available round the clock” and a university ambulance. Rao also stated that Sahastranshu’s death was “not related to academic stress or evaluation practices or hostel conditions”. It noted that NALSAR had a leading “mental health expert” as its faculty and had invested in mental health counseling since 2013, with the academic programme accommodating mental health concerns and student wellbeing.
NLUs have unfortunately formulated a playbook that is entirely fixated on (often incomplete) actions to be taken after such incidents.
In the context of responses depicting ignorance and negligence, the only response worth noting is GNLU’s, perhaps as a result of a consolidated student movement recorded in the public realm. In other NLUs, the response was usual — most of it revolved around suspension of classes, notifying students about the presence of counselors, and in ridiculous cases, spreading a “positive” narrative about the college, or increasing ways of surveillance to monitor students. While this is suffocating for most students, students in NLUs lack a consolidated student movement, and such lack of demand for accountability is further exacerbated by hectic schedules, and competitive, hyper-individualistic environments.
Actions taken only after the incidents
Both legally and beyond, there is recognition that structural safeguards go a long way into preventing cases of suicide and ‘unnatural deaths’ in Universities. NLUs have unfortunately formulated a playbook that is entirely fixated on (often incomplete) actions to be taken after such incidents – suspension of classes for some days, spreading a “positive environment”, and issuing a condolence notice. While students across NLUs seem to recognize the problems with this route, these institutions systematically deny the space for frustration and grievance to be expressed, and for any organising to happen around it.
Just in 2024, the Supreme Court had issued the Sukdeb Saha guidelines mandating all Higher Education Institutions to have constructive safeguards, like an optimal student-to-counselor ratio, mental health/suicide prevention policies, adequate training among staff to engage with students from vulnerable, marginalized backgrounds, periodic review of academic curriculum – to name a few. The Court had issued them in the backdrop of “the growing crisis of student suicides in the context of contemporary education.” Not only should there be a fight for the implementation of these guidelines, but students must also collectively imagine where the Courts and educational institutions are lacking in the conceptualization of a healthy educational system. Students, faculty, and media must step up for this.
In other institutions, we see incidents of suicide become news headlines, materialize into demands before the institution and the Government. For instance, the haunting letter by Rohith Vemula agonized students and anti-caste activists to rightfully seek an anti-discrimination law for HEIs, the Rohith Act. Thousands of scholars, Members of Parliament, activists, and students have called the incident for what it was: an institutional murder.
While talking to various students from NLUs, it came to my attention that their stories have only existed in a vacuum, without reaching public media. In late 2024, I spoke to three journalists from mainstream media who wanted to cover these case of suicide. They explained that they faced difficulties in digging deeper into cases of suicide in NLUs. My own experience suggested that students who tried mobilising against administrative injustice faced heavy fines, suspensions and more informal slandering. Unsurprisingly, none of this news went beyond the four walls of the college.
A tabular overview of student suicides and responses by NLUs
In order to produce a more coherent, and holistic picture, The Leaflet analysed every single publicly recorded incident of suicide that occured across NLUs over three years, between, and including, 2023 and 2025. These were incidents that have been recorded in media coverage. The Leaflet sent detailed questionnaires to each of the NLUs where the recorded incidents took place. Of the NLU administrations, only the Vice Chancellor of NALSAR University of Law, Srikrishna Deva Rao responded.
In response to The Leaflet’s questionnaire, the vice chancellor of NALSAR, Srikrishna Deva Rao noted that the post-mortem was not conducted in Sahastranshu Pandey’s case on “specific request” of his family.
A concerning absence of data
This is to point out that there must be more rigorous research and reportage around the experiences of students in NLUs. For instance, there is currently no publicly available data to address how many students drop out of these law schools. In 2023, Ritesh Pandey, an MP from the Bahujan Samaj Party, sought data in the Lok Sabha on the number of drop-outs in NLUs and other institutions. To this, the Union Minister of state for Education of the time, Subhas Sarkar, noted, “[NLUs] have been established under the Acts enacted by the respective state legislatures and as such they are the state universities. No such data on drop out students of NLUs is maintained by the Central Government.” As a result, no information is recorded by the Centre about the state of drop-outs in NLUs, and is therefore, not accessible to the public.
There also exists no coherent account of the number of functional Internal Complaints Committees, established under the Prevention of Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013. Nor does similar data exist pertaining to Special Cells for Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe students, or other grievance redressal bodies. In law schools, where such bodies exist on paper, there is no adequate student representation. These would be actually constructive mechanisms to ensure the health of students, as opposed to the playbook followed by them currently.
In 2019, 41 SC-ST students from NLU Delhi wrote an email to the legal news portal Live Law, complaining of “harassment, unfair treatment, and torture.” The letter mentioned, “many [students from the SC-ST communities] have dropped out of the course mid-way, and some of them have even attempted suicide.” The Vice Chancellor of NLU Delhi at the time had denied these allegations.
In its questionnaires sent to NLU Odisha, HNLU Raipur, NLSIU, NLU Delhi, GNLU, NUALS Kochi, NLUJAA Assam and NALSAR, The Leaflet sought information on the number of complaints that were received by the SC-ST Cells of the respective universities.
In its questionnaires sent to NLU Odisha, HNLU Raipur, NLSIU, NLU Delhi, GNLU, NUALS Kochi, NLUJAA Assam and NALSAR, The Leaflet sought information on the number of complaints that were received by the SC-ST Cells of the respective universities, and the number of disposed and pending cases in the 2023-24 and 2024-25 academic years. Only NALSAR responded, noting that its SC-ST Cell had not received “any complaints in the academic year 2023-24 and 2024-25”. The absence of complaints, notably, may not necessarily indicate the absence of such incidents; it points to a vacuum in record-keeping. Such situations could be influenced by the teacher-student compositions of the SC-ST cells and the extent of informational accessibility regarding grievance submission. A qualitative study of this information would be crucial to obtain a more holistic understanding.
Vansh’s death in GNLU led to the formation of a probe panel, as a consequence of a collective student movement against the administration in March-April 2024.
Most stories of harassment, suicide, and administrative failure from NLUs end this way – the administration denies the allegations or issues an acknowledgement, with no further inquiry or explanation on the subject. A simple peek into the life of an NLU reveals administrative issues, like lack of redressal bodies, constructive preventative measures, supportive faculty and students among other systemic issues.
The incidents of suicide of the past three years are deeply concerning. The only thing perhaps more concerning are the stories that have not reached us – of young people, suffering, surviving in India’s elite law schools. What is needed, more critically now than ever before, is to aspire for greater public discussions, writings and research work on this issue, to seek accountability of every loss of life in an NLU, every safeguard that has fallen, every accountability that has been foregone.
They have not come here to die. We have not come here to die.
Note: *Pseudonyms have been used to protect the identities of the students interviewed.