‘They have not come here to die’: An epidemic of student suicides plagues India’s National Law Universities

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.