Two Students, Four Hours, One Sunday in Kota

On 27 August 2023, two teenage NEET aspirants died in separate incidents in Kota within four hours of each other. Both had just completed routine coaching tests. The next day, all coaching tests across Kota were suspended.

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Avishkar Shambhaji Kasle was 17. He had come to Kota from Maharashtra to prepare for NEET-UG.

Adarsh Raj was 18. He had come from Bihar.

On the morning of Sunday, 27 August 2023, both students completed their routine weekly coaching screening tests — the standardised internal examinations that Kota's coaching institutes run every weekend to rank students and assign them to performance tiers.

By afternoon, both were dead.

The incidents occurred in separate locations — one in Vigyan Nagar, one in Jawahar Nagar — within approximately four hours of each other. Kota Police registered unnatural death cases under Section 174 CrPC. Forensic teams were deployed. Notes retrieved at both locations cited an inability to meet expected test scores.

By Monday morning, 28 August 2023, it was the 25th student death in Kota that year.

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The Sunday Test

The timing — on a Sunday, on a test day — was not coincidental. Former students and counsellors who have spoken to researchers and journalists consistently describe the internal ranking test as among the most psychologically loaded moments of the Kota week:

• Students are ranked against their entire cohort immediately after each test.
• Scores are published on notice boards visible to all.
• A poor performance can result in batch demotion — a visible, social humiliation in an environment where batch tier determines perceived worth.
• On Sunday evenings, after results, phone calls home carry the week's verdict. Many students describe those calls as the most dreaded part of their week.

For students already struggling — already behind, already under pressure from families who had sacrificed significantly to fund the Kota programme — a bad Sunday test was not simply a bad grade. It was a week's worth of dread compressed into a single afternoon.

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The Administration's Response

The following morning, District Collector O.P. Bunkar issued an emergency order:

All routine periodic tests and screening examinations conducted by coaching institutes across Kota district are hereby suspended for a period of two months, effective immediately. Any institute found conducting tests during this period shall face immediate legal action.

The order covered every major coaching institute in the city — Allen, Resonance, Motion, Vibrant, and all smaller affiliated centres.

Coaching institutes complied. They agreed to deploy psychologists on campus, conduct stress-reduction workshops, and establish student support helplines. The Rajasthan High Court issued directions requiring compliance reports.

The test ban was the most concrete structural intervention the city had seen. It was also, as many mental health professionals noted at the time, a response to the symptom — not the structure that produced it.

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What the Notes Said

Both students left written notes. The police disclosed that the content of both centred on the gap between expected academic performance and actual results — and on anxiety about what that gap meant for the families who had invested in their Kota years.

These were not notes expressing hopelessness about life in general. They were notes expressing specific, particular terror about failing an examination system, and about the cost of that failure to people they loved.

That specificity matters. It points directly to what needs to change.

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Timeline: INC-2023-RJ-KOTA-0011

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Sources & Further Reading

1. "Two NEET aspirants die by suicide in Kota within four hours; 23 deaths this year" — Hindustan Times, 28 August 2023. hindustantimes.com
2. "Kota administration suspends routine coaching tests for two months following double tragedy" — The Hindu, 29 August 2023. thehindu.com
3. iCall: 9152987821 | Vandrevala Foundation: 1860-2662-345 (24-hour helpline)