As Asia Times Online reports,
"I'll come back as a ghost to haunt my teachers," read the suicide note of a teenaged Indian student who recently shot himself in the head due to exam-linked stress. Another student - 16-year-old Anita Naresh - quaffed a bottle of pesticide in the run-up to her annual exams. More recently, Rajneesh Mittal, 17, created a national kerfuffle by trying to kill himself inside an examination hall.
March is the year's most dreaded month for Indian students: it's exam time and the pressure to excel can be lethal. This year, as many as 100 students have already committed suicide - in sometimes bizarre situations - across the sub-continent, leaving the country, and especially its parents, wondering whether the final deathly toll will exceed the 2006 mark when a staggering 5,857 Indian students attempted suicide due to exam blues, according to the National Crime Records Bureau.
Disquietingly, those who aren't pushed to the brink still have to grapple with acute anxiety and depression. Some are even led to experiment with macabre stress-busting recipes. This year's "hot" stress relievers, for instance, are broth made from lizard's body parts, bread slices smeared with pain-relief ointments and shoe polish, anti-epilepsy drugs, and the fumes of nail polish removers.
"Some students from the science stream are even making their own drugs from chemicals and salts available in their school labs," said New Delhi-based cardiologist Dr K K Agarwal, president of the Heart Care Foundation of India, at a recent press conference in Delhi. Helping the students in their quest for such life-threatening stress-busters, says the doctor, are websites which give them a step-by-step recipes for the concoctions.
According to clinical psychologist Dr Vedahi Bharati, there's an urgent need for cyber laws which can vet these web portals. The expert also proposes laws for parents, children, chemists and pharmaceutical companies to stop the casual buying and selling of OTC (over the counter) stress-relieving amphetamine drugs whose sales skyrocket during the exam period.
Exam stress isn't a particularly new phenomenon on the Indian academic landscape. Cases of depression and the stray suicide case have been common for many years. But lately, the situation has acquired a new gravitas with newspapers and TV channels reporting student suicides nearly every day.
What's pushing today's Indian students - a bright generation with a global reputation for their high intelligence quotient - to the brink? Experts believe the problem is symptomatic of a deeper issues; parental and peer pressure, rising ambitions and fierce competition are brewing a deadly cocktail for these young minds. Moreover, a nation racing towards affluence, an economy on a remarkable upward growth trajectory and skyrocketing salaries are putting unprecedented pressure on youth to succeed.
According to Delhi-based clinical psychologist Dr Veena Deb, "Parental expectations have also risen enormously over the years which is propelling these kids to breaking point." Deb feels that the changing dynamics of the Indian family - particularly, the death of the joint family system - means that there are fewer family elders around to counsel the young. With both parents working, and nobody at home to turn to in a crisis, it's easier for the youth to engage in high-risk behavior.
Unsurprisingly, around March, it's common for student helplines, resurrected by numerous voluntary organizations and non-governmental organizations, to be inundated with distress calls. "Most students feel relieved to be able to just pick up the phone and share their fears with someone," said a volunteer at a New Delhi-based helpline service. "It's a great catharsis for them and works like a salve for their frazzled minds."
The volunteer said many callers complain about pushy parents and recounted that last week a boy called in to ask where he could buy a pistol to shoot his mother for nagging him too much.
Sanjeevini, an official from another crisis intervention center, said, "An identity crisis, uncertainty regarding getting admission to the courses of their choice in college and a fear of low marks sullying their reputation are usually the main reasons for students attempting to end their lives."
Apart from insecurity and societal change sweeping across India, another big reason for student distress is the modern Indian education system. Outdated and flab-ridden, it puts an undue emphasis on rote learning and passing exams with a high percentage discounting creativity and personality development.
Of course there's no denying that in India, the student demographic - about 70% of India's 1.1 billion population is under 30 years, a sizeable chunk of which are students - leads to an enormous demand-supply gap. For instance, this year, over 1.3 million students are appearing for the Class X and XII Board exams conducted by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) as against the 1.2 million who appeared last year.
These gargantuan numbers will create a mad scramble for the limited number of seats available at the top-notch engineering, medical and business schools that yield the most lucrative career options. For the undergraduate B-Tech and M-Tech programs offered through IIT-JEE (Joint Entrance Examination), for instance, around 350,000 students will compete for 5,000 seats.
Similarly, for the blue-chip Indian Institute of Management (IIM), from a large pool of about 250,000 applicants, only 1,200 manage to procure seats each year. This makes the exam even more selective than all the top US business schools put together. In fact the overall acceptance rate at IIM ranges between 0.1 to 0.4% compared with the acceptance rate of around five to 10% in the top US schools.
Keeping this severe crunch in mind, proponents of a better education system have often criticized the Indian government's frugal expenditure on education. According to the Kothari Commission set up in 1966, which put forward the blueprint for reform of the Indian education system, the central expenditure on education should be a minimum of 6% of gross domestic product (GDP). However, India's current figure hovers around 4%, far less than Saudi Arabia which invests 9.5% of its GDP in education and Norway, Malaysia, France and South Africa all of who spend in excess of 5%.
Apart from insufficient funding, many feel the entire Indian education system needs a revamp as it is based on an archaic template established by the British in the 19th century. Sporadic attempts by the Central Board of Secondary Education to relax admission criteria and make the exam system more student-friendly, have been brushed aside by critics as feeble sideshows, not really targeted at tackling the root of the problem.
All this is a pity considering India, the world's largest democracy, is increasingly viewed as a strong global player due to its exploding economic growth and enviable human resource wealth. If Delhi refuses to do anything about the future of India's young people - many of whom are literally killing themselves over academic pressure - it ought to be a matter of national shame.
Credits: Asia Times
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