When trigonometry is compulsory, why is emotional first aid optional?

Student suicides are not anomalies but symptoms of a system that neglects emotional safety

In Kota last winter, a 17-year-old boy leaned over a hostel balcony and stepped into the silence he could not find in his mind. His note spoke of an ‘emotional debt’, a burden he could neither repay nor describe without shame. He never mentioned grades or rankings, yet those absences explained them all. In his final words lay a truth India prefers not to read: our schools teach children to carry books, not their own hearts.

According to the Crime in India 2025 report by the National Crime Records Bureau, more than 13,000 Indian students died by suicide in 2022. Many had no prior diagnosis. What they shared was the inability to name distress, the belief that help-seeking is weakness, and peer networks too thin to break isolation. In a system where trigonometry is compulsory but emotional first aid is optional, these deaths are not anomalies. They are predictable outcomes of institutions that train the mind while neglecting the person.

Psychology of education is unambiguous about what protects young people. Belonging, not just attendance. Warm, structured relationships with adults, not just surveillance. Routines that normalise naming feelings. Repeated chances to practise co-operation and negotiate conflict. Decades of studies show that high-quality social and emotional learning (SEL) programmes lift grades, improve behaviour and reduce distress with gains that persist into later life.

The OECD’s work on students’ social-emotional skills adds a blunt warning for India: where students feel unsafe or unheard, academic effort fades, and risk behaviours rise. In plain language, a school climate where how safe, respected, and supported a child feels predicts both learning and well-being better than another hour of cram.

Countries that take this seriously treat care as curriculum. Finland’s evidence-based KiVa anti-bullying programme, designed at the University of Turku and now used worldwide, has cut bullying and improved school climate in rigorous trials. Scotland’s ‘Getting It Right for Every Child’ built a whole-system duty of care around eight wellbeing indicators, ensuring concerns are caught early across school, health, and social work.

Closer home, Delhi’s ‘Happiness Curriculum’ inserts daily, non-examined mindfulness, and social-emotional lessons into government classrooms; teachers report calmer rooms and more willing talkers. India also has a national platform in the School Health and Wellness Programme under Ayushman Bharat, which trains ‘health and wellness ambassadors’ in every school. These are not luxuries. They are the safety rails without which academics wobble.

We need not copy-paste, but we must commit. Our traditions insist that education is a moral project as much as an economic one. Mahatma Gandhi’s Antyodaya asks that reform be judged by its effect on the most vulnerable child. Buddhist Karuṇā frames compassion as a disciplined practice, not occasional charity. Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi reminds us that the best schools teach us to hold another’s pain as our own. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 uses similar language, ‘ethical reasoning’, ‘holistic development’, yet, five years on, these ideals risk becoming wallpaper unless we put time, training, and money behind them.

This is the moment to move from promise to practice. The curriculum revisions due in 2025 should make care literacy teachable, examinable, and funded. In the early years, ‘feeling circles’ can use local stories and even Bharatanatyam mudras to give children words and gestures for anger, shame, pride and joy.

In middle school, ‘conflict clinics’ can work through real dilemmas from caste teasing to online pile-ons using guided discussion rather than scolding. In higher secondary, short, supervised apprenticeships in eldercare, disability centres, or community shelters can translate empathy into civic action. None of this is about diluting rigour. It is about making rigour humane and sustainable.

The economics line up. Global evidence suggests school-based mental-health and SEL programmes deliver returns that exceed costs several times over through reduced health spending, higher graduation, and better productivity. For finance departments and school boards budgeting under constraint, that matters. What matters even more is public trust. Parents will back reforms they can see: calmer corridors, fewer bullying incidents, and quicker referrals when children struggle.

The Centre can accelerate this by ring-fencing modest funds for school climate, embedding simple, termly measures of safety and belonging, and publishing dashboards that let communities see progress. It is hard to argue against what is visible and working.

Predictably, critics will ask whether schools, already overloaded, can carry one more mission. The harder question is whether we can afford not to. When classrooms breed emotional poverty, the hidden costs are paid for years: by the teenager who cannot ask for help until it is too late; by the girl who leaves after relentless taunts; by the boy who bottles rage and later turns it outward. A country that dreams of a demographic dividend cannot accept such situations as routine. If we want academic excellence, we must fix the climate in which academics are attempted.

The boy in Kota should not have had to frame his last wish in a note. His plea, that schools teach us to carry hearts, not just books, can still become a directive. The Ministry of Education, examination boards, and state governments have both the authority and the responsibility to act. Put care into timetables, teacher training, and budgets. Use India’s own platforms to measure safety and belonging term by term. Publish the results. Hold yourselves to them.

If we do, India’s classrooms can stop minting emotional debt and start compounding a different capital: belonging, dignity, and the strength to ask for help when it matters the most.

Debdulal Thakur is Professor and Dean, Vinayaka Mission’s School of Economics and Public Policy, Chennai.