The Fatal Tyranny Of 'Log Kya Kahenge': Why India Urgently Needs A Swachh Manas Abhiyan

On Friday, September 17, a 22-year-old student at IIT Bombay died by suicide—just a day after being caught using ChatGPT during an examination. Assurances by faculty that no disciplinary action would follow proved futile. It is the third such death at IIT Bombay in seven months, following an equally tragic case at IIT Delhi last month. Each incident triggers the same cycle: shock, protests, institutional statements, and a promised inquiry—and then, until the next incident, silence.

The true scale of the student suicide crisis in India is often obscured by narrow administrative classification. NCRB's latest report records 13,892 student suicides in India in 2023—8.1% of all suicides that year, the highest absolute count in a decade. Independent epidemiological research suggests the real toll could be much higher. In a landmark Lancet Public Health study, Prof Rakhi Dandona and colleagues estimated India's age-standardised suicide rate at 17.9 per 100,000—roughly 230,000 deaths in 2016 alone, nearly 100,000 more than the NCRB count for that year, and more than India's combined AIDS and maternal deaths for the same period. Yet, suicide prevention commands a fraction of institutional urgency.

The Social Trap: 'Log Kya Kahenge'

The root cause for this tragedy lies not in the weight of the curriculum but in an underlying psychological toll woven into our societal expectations.

Unfortunately, we are a culture held hostage by a corrosive perceived question: "Log kya kahenge?" An academic setback rarely stays a private, momentary setback—it unwittingly becomes an existential “stain” on the family name, as parents and relatives unconsciously project their own social standing onto their children. We Indians are known for training our youngsters exhaustively in how to celebrate victory, but barely ever do we either teach or train them in how they should face and overcome failure or survive defeat.

Manufactured Expectations: Media And Coaching

This culture of shame—arising out of a so-called failure—does not arise in a vacuum; it is manufactured and amplified every results season. The morning after JEE or NEET results, front pages and full-page advertisements across the country trumpet 99-percentile toppers, curated by coaching chains as proof of their factory-like success.

Months later, the same papers front-page the rare IIT graduate who lands a Rs 1-5 crore package from an international firm during their annual placement—even though such offers go to a handful of students each year. Out of roughly 18,800 students admitted annually across all 23 IITs, a handful land up with such a hefty annual placement package. Besides, the news hardly ever cover the fact that even at the premium IITs, the median packages, while respectable, are a fraction of these headline numbers—and that among the roughly 15 lakh engineering graduates India produces annually, a large proportion, from thousands of lesser-known colleges, struggle to find any job that matches their qualification.

Unfortunately, the aberration of the hefty pay package is sold as the norm. This selective, sensational coverage—amplified by coaching institutes with a direct commercial stake in the aspiration—manufactures a benchmark of success that is statistically false and psychologically ruinous, feeding directly into the very "log kya kahenge" culture that crushes children who fall short of it.

Brilliant Minds And Blunders

This societal obsession with uninterrupted success is profoundly anti-science. Science and scientists teach us that discovery is not a march of triumphs but a succession of productive miscalculations. Astrophysicist Mario Livio, in his book ‘Brilliant Blunders’, showed how five of history's greatest minds—Darwin, Lord Kelvin, Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle, and Einstein—made colossal errors while reshaping our understanding of the universe. Einstein called his cosmological constant his “biggest blunder”. Edison said he hadn't failed thousands of times but found thousands of ways that didn't work. India's own Srinivasa Ramanujan repeatedly failed in subjects other than maths in his intermediate exams in Madras, losing his scholarship.

Ramanujan’s fear of failure is borne out from anecdotal news of his running away from home to Vishakhapatnam. Fortunately for Ramanujan, and for the world of maths, a newspaper appeal for his return to Madras helped him return to the city and overcome his enduring poverty before going on to reshape the world of mathematics. The rigid metrics of success we use today would have discarded him entirely. Fortunately, that was not to be.

In India, one can surmise that the same fear of failure that discourages students also stunts adult risk-taking. Research from Stanford's Ilya Strebulaev found that 44% of founders behind 500-plus US unicorns were foreign-born, with India-born founders topping the list—ahead of Israel. Indian minds build billion-dollar companies readily on Silicon Valley soil; at home, a failed venture is treated as social ruin rather than a lesson. And when even a seasoned industrialist like Café Coffee Day's V.G. Siddhartha reportedly writes in his final note, "I have failed as an entrepreneur" and "today I gave up", how can we expect eighteen-year-olds to bear the same weight of societal expectation without breaking?

The Need For A 'Swachh Manas Abhiyan

For fixing this problem, we need to go beyond helplines. India needs “A Swachh Manas Abhiyan:

l A national movement, on the scale of Swachh Bharat, to de-stigmatise failure and dismantle “log kya kahenge”.

l A pedagogy of resilience, curricula that formally value grit, trial, and endurance alongside marks.

l An end to hyper-punitive grading and confidential counselling free of academic consequence.

l Responsible media and coaching disclosure, mandatory, verified reporting of actual pass, placement, and dropout rates alongside every topper advertisement.

Failure is the other side of the coin of human endeavour. Until we teach our students—and ourselves—to face it with pride rather than shame, we will keep losing the very minds meant to build tomorrow's India.

The writer is Senior Advisor CSMVS Museum, Trustee, Gandhi Smarak Nidhi, Mani Bhavan, Mumbai; former director, Nehru Science Centre, Mumbai, National Science Centre, Delhi, Visvesvaraya Museum, Bangalore and Director NGMA Mumbai.