'Campus Mothers' is not care. It is patriarchy and gendered exploitation

IIT Kharagpur’s proposal to appoint women, specifically those with prior experience of motherhood, as ‘campus mothers’ to support students in emotional distress, is not just patronising, it is a deeply misogynistic and regressive move cloaked in the language of care.

In a move that has sparked more concerns than applause, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur has proposed a new initiative called ‘Campus Mothers’, under which women residing on campus (including both faculty and non-faculty) will be trained to provide emotional support and mentorship to students in distress.

Announced by the institute’s director, Suman Chakraborty, the programme is presented as a response to the rising cases of student suicides across IITs — with three such deaths reported at IIT Kharagpur alone this year.

Chakraborty’s rationale is rooted in a particular vision of maternal care. “Having gone through motherhood, they understand the unique challenges children face,” he says, noting that students often struggle to adjust after years of close parental monitoring. The proposed solution? A structured system where women with prior experience of motherhood volunteer to step in and offer guidance and emotional support to students navigating their academic and personal challenges.

While the language of care and community might sound comforting on the surface, this proposal raises serious questions about gendered assumptions, institutional accountability, and the politics of emotional labour in our society.

The proposal to appoint women, specifically those with prior experience of motherhood as ‘campus mothers’ to support students in emotional distress, is not just patronising, it is a deeply misogynistic and regressive move cloaked in the language of care. It draws from entrenched gendered assumptions that equate femininity with nurturing, motherhood with emotional labour, and women’s value with their ability to soothe others. In doing so, it reduces caregiving to a ‘natural’ feminine instinct rather than recognising it as skilled, professional, and emotionally demanding work.

This is not care, it’s cost-cutting masked as compassion. By roping in women as volunteers to do the difficult work of care, institutions conveniently sidestep their responsibility to build robust, professional mental health infrastructure. Where are the trained counsellors, caste-sensitive therapists, peer-support networks, or grievance redress mechanisms? Instead of investing in these systems, the burden is once again shifted to women — unpaid, unrecognised, and undervalued.

This isn't an isolated case. The Indian State has long relied on this model, of outsourcing essential care work to women in the name of community service. Take ASHA workers, for instance. They form the backbone of public health delivery in India, working tirelessly through pandemics, maternal crises, and child health emergencies. Yet they are labelled ‘volunteers’ and denied basic labour rights, social security, or fair wages. Their labour is seen as a natural extension of their gender — not as skilled, essential, or deserving of dignified compensation. IIT Kharagpur’s proposal echoes this same exploitative logic: institutional care becomes the unpaid duty of women, rather than a funded, professional responsibility.

IIT Kharagpur’s director suggests that volunteer ‘campus mothers’ could share tea or dinner with distressed students, offering them a space to open up. But this dangerously trivialises the severity of student mental health crises. Emotional care is not about maternal warmth or comforting platitudes; it is about understanding trauma, navigating depression, addressing social anxiety, and responding to suicidal ideation, which is the work of a professional. These are not casual conversations; they are clinical, urgent, and political.

What this proposal offers is not care, but a performance of care — one that replaces trained mental health professionals with gendered archetypes. To suggest that a maternal presence can mend the fractures of a hyper-competitive, casteist, and exclusionary system is not just naïve, it is irresponsible. In fact, such tokenistic models risk silencing students further by offering them empty empathy without the tools to address the structures harming them.

According to ‘Student Suicides: An Epidemic Sweeping India’ report, which draws from NCRB data, student suicides are rising at a rate faster than overall suicide trends and disproportionately affecting the Dalit, the Adivasi, and the OBC students. These deaths are not personal tragedies alone; they are institutional failures rooted in caste-based exclusion, academic alienation, and administrative apathy.

What students need is not mothers, but structural justice. They need campuses where they are not made to feel like intruders. They need active anti-discrimination mechanisms, diverse and empathetic faculty, and access to trained, trauma-informed mental health professionals — not volunteer women tasked with offering tea and emotional reassurance.

To outsource the burden of student well-being to women in the name of maternal care is to depoliticise and domesticate what is, at its core, a crisis of systemic violence. It privatises emotional suffering and lets institutions wash their hands of responsibility, reinforcing the same casteist and gendered hierarchies that marginalise students in the first place.

We must stop sentimentalising student suicides. These are not isolated personal tragedies. What we need is not more ‘care’ draped in patriarchal imagery, but accountability. We need investment in mental health infrastructure, in pedagogy that does not alienate, enforceable affirmative action, in policies that protect students from caste, religion, and gender-based discrimination, and in campus cultures that nurture solidarity and sensitivity instead of silence. Anything less is not care, but complicity.

(Anjali Chauhan is a researcher currently pursuing PhD in political science at the University of Delhi.) (X handle: @chauhananjali98)

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.