In response to the mounting student suicides reportedly caused, in part, by mental health issues, the Kota district administration has issued an order mandating the installation of spring-loaded fans in all hostel rooms and paying guest accommodations in the city.
Spring-loaded fans are designed to collapse when a certain amount of weight is applied to them. This is intended to prevent people from using them to hang themselves.
Kota district collector OP Bunkar issued the order which aims to “provide mental support and security to the students studying and living in these accommodations, and to prevent suicides from increasing coaching students”.
This comes after an order which was issued in December last year keeping in mind about the student welfare, including: a weekly off for student, a maximum class-strength of 80, mandatory psychological evaluations for both students and teachers, the establishment of a helpline for students and the creation of a suicide prevention committee.
The order also stated that the owners of coaching institutes, hostels, and PGs will be held responsible if any student commits suicide.
Recently, the district administration said that it will conduct psychological tests of coaching students every fortnight. The tests will help in finding out suicidal tendencies among students so that they could be provided with timely counselling.
“We are going to conduct psychological test every fortnight of every coaching student, whether he is in coaching institute, hostel or PG,” Kota district collector OP Bunkar said.
The Kota administration order comes after an 18-year-old boy, who arrived in Rajasthan's Kota to prepare for JEE Mains for admission into the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), reportedly died by suicide on Tuesday night. This has pushed up the number of student suicides in the education hub to 22 this year and the fourth such case this month.
The boy, identified as Valmiki Jangid from Bihar’s Gaya, was staying at Kota’s Mahavir Nagar area since last year. He was studying in a coaching institute to prepare for the JEE Mains examination.
Notably, 19 cases of suicide, including 3 in first 10 days of this month, by coaching students have so far been reported in the coaching hub this year since January.
The unrelenting academic pressures and intensely competitive environment in Kota have been contributing to a mental health crisis of alarming proportions. Rajasthan’s “education city” might churn out successful professionals every year, but it has also been witness to a grim underbelly of immense adolescent stress and heart-rending stories of student suicides.
A survey found that four out of every ten students were suffering from depression. But in Kota, the problem seems especially acute. The focus on performance, the isolation from family, and, at times, lack of sufficient attention to students' emotional well-being by academic institutions, have aggravated the mental health scenario.
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