Toppers, Trophies,Tragedies: The Cost of Success Obsession

We all loves our rank-holders — IIT engineers, IIM graduates, IAS officers. What we don’t talk is the price some pay to get there.

Government data placed before the Rajya Sabha recorded 61 student suicides across IITs, NITs and IIMs between 2018 and 2023 — with the toll climbing to 16 in a single year, 2022, as campuses reopened post-pandemic. In Kota, India’s coaching capital for JEE and NEET aspirants, 2023 saw 26 student suicides, the highest ever recorded in the city — a number that fell to 17 in 2024 after urgent safety and counselling interventions. Even the corridors of Mukherjee Nagar and Old Rajinder Nagar, where lakhs of young Indians prepare to become India’s future bureaucrats, have witnessed the same story: aspirants who cracked prelims but couldn’t outrun the weight of expectation.

NIMHANS’s National Mental Health Survey found that 7.3% of Indians aged 13–17 already live with a diagnosable mental disorder — and the treatment gap nationally stands at 84.5%. These are not isolated tragedies. They are a pattern.

This is the space SOHAMINDIA has been quietly working in.

Over the last 3 years, our university programme has reached almost 14 states and 60+ institutions, touching 4,000 young people — creating rooms where graduates and aspirants can finally say what they usually swallow: the fear of not measuring up, the exhaustion of chasing a success that was never truly theirs.

We ask harder questions instead of offering easy answers — what does a successful life look like beyond a rank or a title, and can mindfulness be a daily discipline rather than a last resort?

Ambition and inner peace aren’t opposites. It’s time we stopped asking young India to choose.