The Registry

What the year-by-year numbers show

The data available from RTI filings and Rajasthan Assembly records covers 2015 through October 2024. The pattern is not a straight line upward.

In 2015, the recorded count was 17. In 2016 and 2017, it dropped — to 15 and 7 respectively. The 2017 figure is the lowest in the available dataset. Researchers and journalists have not agreed on a single explanation for the 2016–17 dip; some have attributed it to heightened policy attention following the 2015 figure, others note that NEET's national implementation in 2016 may have temporarily redistributed the student population as institutes adapted.

From 2018 onward, the trend is more consistently upward: 20 in 2018, 18 in 2019, 13 in 2020, 20 in 2021, 15 in 2022. The 2020 dip corresponds to the COVID-19 year, during which many students left Kota and coaching switched partially online — reducing the in-city student population and thus the in-city count.

2023 was the peak year: 26 recorded student deaths. This figure received significant national attention. Following 2023, the Rajasthan government and Kota coaching institutes implemented a range of interventions: mandatory installation of anti-climb nets in hostel buildings, restrictions on locks in hostel rooms, mandatory mental health counsellors, regulated study hours, and prohibitions on displaying rank lists publicly. By mid-2024, the count was tracking lower than 2023.

The total across 2015–2024 is 142.

What the number doesn't tell us

The annual count is the figure that dominates media coverage. It is also, in isolation, the least analytically useful part of the data.

Rate, not count, is the relevant metric. Kota's enrolled student population is estimated between 125,000 and 175,000 students depending on the year. 26 deaths in a city of 175,000 students gives a rate of approximately 14.9 per 100,000 per year. The national youth suicide rate in India is approximately 10–12 per 100,000 per year (NCRB data). Kota's rate, on this estimate, is elevated — but not by an order of magnitude, and the comparison requires careful interpretation because Kota's student population is not representative of Indian youth as a whole: it is younger, predominantly male, under significantly greater acute stress, and geographically isolated from family support.

We do not have a comparison group. To know whether Kota is uniquely dangerous, we would need the suicide rate among students of the same age preparing for the same examinations in other cities, or at home, or not preparing for competitive exams at all. That data does not exist in any systematic form. The absence of a comparison group makes it impossible to state with precision how much of the elevated rate is attributable to Kota specifically versus to competitive exam preparation more broadly versus to the age group in general.

The causes of individual deaths are not in the registry. Suicide is almost always multi-causal. Exam pressure, family pressure, financial debt, social isolation, untreated depression, grief, relationship conflict, and physical health problems can all be contributing factors. The police record that a death occurred. It does not record the psychological, social, or medical context. Media reports of individual cases describe what families say — which is valuable, but not systematically gathered.

The data cannot tell us whether policy interventions are working. The 2024 numbers trended lower after the 2023 peak and subsequent interventions. That could mean the interventions worked. It could mean the enrolled student population was lower in 2024. It could mean there was natural regression to the mean after an unusually high year. Distinguishing between these explanations requires data that the police registry alone cannot provide.

What we know about gender and geography

The registry does not publish demographic breakdowns. What is available comes from RTI responses and media investigations that have documented individual cases.

Investigative coverage — particularly from *The Hindu*, *Indian Express*, and *Hindustan Times* — suggests that male students account for a larger share of recorded deaths than female students, broadly consistent with the national pattern in which male suicide rates in India are significantly higher than female rates across most age groups. However, without systematic data, this cannot be stated with precision for the Kota-specific dataset.

Geographic analysis of media-reported cases suggests that a disproportionate share of students who die by suicide in Kota come from states with the highest NEET competition intensity — Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra. These are also the states with the highest NEET registration numbers and the most competitive coaching ecosystems. This pattern is consistent with the hypothesis that the students experiencing the most acute pressure are those from states where NEET performance is most consequential and where coaching is most deeply embedded.

The registry does not record which institute the deceased student was enrolled in, or whether they were a first-year or repeat student. The TISS 2018 study found that repeaters — students sitting NEET for the second or third time — reported significantly higher distress scores than first-year students. If repeaters are disproportionately represented among students who die by suicide, that would be analytically important. The registry cannot confirm or deny this.

What this data means, and what it requires

One hundred and forty-two students in ten years. 26 in one year alone.

These are not numbers that can be evaluated purely statistically. They represent individual deaths — of students who left home, in most cases at 16 or 17, to sit an examination that would determine whether they could become doctors. Many of them had been preparing for years. Many of them came from families who had borrowed money, sold assets, or rearranged their lives to support that preparation.

The data cannot resolve the policy question — whether Kota should exist in its current form, whether coaching should be regulated differently, whether the examination system itself needs structural change. Those are questions that involve values as much as evidence.

What the data does establish, beyond reasonable doubt, is that the mental health infrastructure in Kota — the number of trained counsellors, the availability of immediate crisis support, the cultural openness to help-seeking among students — was inadequate for the population it was serving. The TISS study found fewer than 10 per cent of distressed students sought professional support. The Kota Police registry records what happens when that gap is never closed.

The Rajasthan government has now mandated mental health counsellors in coaching institutes, anti-climb infrastructure in hostels, and a distress helpline. Whether these measures are sufficient, and whether they are being effectively implemented, requires monitoring that has not yet produced published data.

What this registry cannot do is bring any of those 142 students back.

What this data doesn't prove

That Kota's student suicide rate is uniquely high. The absence of a matched comparison group — students preparing for NEET and JEE elsewhere, or adolescents of the same age not in coaching — makes it impossible to establish whether Kota is distinctively dangerous or whether exam-preparation stress at this intensity produces similar rates wherever it occurs.

That exam failure is the primary cause. Media reporting of individual cases frequently attributes deaths to exam pressure or fear of failure. Police records and family accounts are the sources for these attributions, and they may be accurate in many cases. But suicide is almost always multi-causal. Depression, social isolation, financial distress, relationship conflict, and untreated mental illness are common co-factors. A single-cause attribution is almost never complete.

That any individual policy intervention caused the 2024 improvement. The reduction in numbers following 2023's peak and the subsequent policy interventions is encouraging. It is not, on available evidence, possible to attribute that reduction specifically to any single measure — anti-climb nets, counsellors, restricted study hours, or reduced enrollment.

That the problem is unique to Kota. Students preparing for competitive exams in other cities — Delhi, Hyderabad, Pune, Patna — are not subject to the same systematic data collection. The absence of data from other cities does not mean the problem is absent; it may mean the problem is invisible elsewhere because no one is counting.

That the official registry is complete. The criteria for inclusion create known exclusions. Students who leave Kota before dying are not counted. The actual number of coaching-related student suicides in India — across all exam-preparation contexts, all cities, all states — is certainly higher than any single city's registry records.