Updated August 2, 2026 at 11:56 AM CDT
NAGPUR, India — Neelum Chaturvedi says her daughter's English handwriting was beautiful. She shows off a note in curly ballpoint. It begins: "Mummy, Pappa." It's the suicide note that her 18-year-old daughter Akanksha wrote before she took her life in May. "I could never find fault in her," her mother says.
Chaturvedi hugs a framed picture of her smiling daughter, garlanded with plastic flowers. Now and then, she lifts the framed picture and strokes the flowers away from Akanksha's face, like they're untidy bangs.
Akanksha's suicide was one of around a dozen by Indian students that were covered by Indian media, and became one trigger for protests that have shaken the government of the Hindu nationalist prime minister Narendra Modi, who has ruled for over a decade.
The Indian Express newspaper reported that the deaths came after the country's education ministry cancelled the results of a medical college entry exam that some 2 million students had taken, saying the questions had been leaked. Students were then ordered to retake the high-pressure test, in which they competed for some 30,000 general admission places.
Intense pressure on students
Akanksha's note echoed that found by other families after their children died. "Mummy, papa, you sincerely believed that your daughter will study and become a doctor. But I don't have the courage," she wrote – referring to retaking the exam. "Sorry," Akanksha wrote. "I have ruined everything."
Sadly, there have long been thousands of suicides a year among students in India. But some argue that high pressure exams are contributing to an increase. The Hindu newspaper reported that student suicides increased from 8,068 in 2014 to 14,488 in 2024. Around a fifth died after they failed to clear exams, the paper reported.
Critics say the crisis begins with a complex education system in the country that does not treat its more than 200 million students equally. The federal government's spending on education has declined to 2.5 percent of its budget, The Indian Express reports. Enrolment in public schools is declining as parents turn to the private sector, but the poorest are stuck.
Even if children finish school with top marks, they must clear exams for university admissions or to attain a highly sought-after government job.
But just about the only way to clear those exams is to pay for tuition at coaching centers, says Maheshwer Peri, who runs a company that helps students select careers, and who has emerged as a prominent critic of the government's education policies. His company's own analysis of public data found that some 95 students of every 100 who cleared exams came through a coaching center. The coaching centers train students on how to answer the questions quickly, and which subjects to focus on.
Such coaching is "a huge industry," says Pradip Saha, an author who writes on education. The number of students are "in the tens of millions," but the industry is unregulated, so there's no precise data on enrollments, or how many students clear the exam they sign up to study for. The successful students are a tiny minority, owing to the number of students taking the test and the very few jobs or university placements they apply for. But centers typically emblazon on banners the names and faces of students who passed their exams with high scores.
There's also no data on how much debt Indian families incur to put their children through coaching. And yet, Saha says, some coaching centers have tie-ins with companies that offer loans, which is a likely conflict of interest when "parents will pay anything to these coaching centers," because clearing an exam for a prestigious university or job "is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of opportunity."
Akanksha's story
Akanksha's parents say when she was a baby, they moved 300 miles from their village to the central Indian city of Nagpur, where there's better government schools.
Their daughter did well, and landed high grades. Akanksha then told her parents she wanted to try to become a doctor — a rare profession that offers economic mobility in India.
Akanksha enrolled in a two-year tuition course through a franchise known as Physics Wallah, which cost her family around $910. They paid about $10 upfront, a spokesperson told NPR, and they took a loan for the remaining amount through a tie-in loan company.
Akanksha's father Krishna Kumar says no matter how much he worked as a cook, he couldn't meet the repayments. He isn't paid much, and has to stay home when his arm inexplicably stiffens. On a recent day, Kumar cradled his stiff left arm in his lap and said, "the bank people were harassing me," so he sold his only asset: his land in his ancestral village. "I sold it, telling myself, how can a laborer afford to train kids to be a doctor?"
Kumar says he borrowed more money from his brother-in-law to stay afloat. He says Akanksha worried about their debts. She'd assuage him: "Don't worry papa, I'm going to pay it all back."
She also worried about her father's health. Her parents say she kept track of his doctor's appointments, his medicines, and his medical files. She promised to be her father's doctor when she graduated. "It was her dream," he says, "and it was the dream of her poor parents."
To meet that promise, Akanksha studied relentlessly, slept very little, and often forgot to eat. Her mother walked to the only bedroom in their narrow walkup, which they gave to Akanksha, so she could study in privacy. A note was still taped to the wall: MAY 3. Practice Makes a Woman Perfect!
That was the day of the medical school entry exams. "She was very happy after the exams," her mother said. She told her parents that she thought she'd done well enough to enter a medical college. Then on May 12, the education ministry announced it was canceling the exam results.
For days after the exam results were cancelled, she stayed in her room. She wasn't her chirpy self. And then, she died. "My daughter is dead," Kumar says. "She killed herself over an exam leak."
Other factors in protests
Akanksha's death, alongside other students, was partly a trigger for the protests that emerged in early June. Another trigger was a comment by India's chief justice, Surya Kant, who described unemployed youth as "cockroaches."
The justice said he was misquoted, but the comment drew widespread outrage in a country where some 67% of graduates were unemployed in 2023, and few ever find salaried work. Then 30-year-old Abhijeet Dipke, formed the satirical, online "Cockroach Janata Party," or CJP, a play on the ruling party, the BJP. It quickly amassed millions of followers.
Dipke declared a sit-in in New Delhi, demanding the resignation of education minister Dharmendra Pradhan, which hundreds of students joined. Protests picked up pace after police carted away a respected educator, Sonum Wangchuk, who was on a solidarity hunger strike. It picked up pace again after security forces attacked tens of thousands of protesters attempting to march to parliament on Monday, July 20. Protests erupted in more than a dozen cities across India.
After ignoring the students for weeks, prime minister Narendra Modi promised the perpetrators of the exam leak would be brought to justice quickly. When that didn't end the protests, education minister Pradhan resigned on July 25, and the government agreed to pay compensation to families who lost their children.
The government also announced a committee to propose exam reforms. However, political scientist Šumit Ganguly, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, told NPR that he doubts whether it would lead to any changes. Ganguly said: "Lots of people stand to benefit from the vast bureaucracy that administers these things, [so] why would they want drastic change?"
That includes the government itself, which earns an 18% tax on payments to coaching centers.
Akanksha's mother said no official had been in touch to discuss compensation, claiming they hadn't even offered their condolences. "We are little people, insects," she said. "Why would the government come to ask about an insect?"
Contradicting those claims, a BJP municipal official, Yogesh Pachpor, said he tried meeting the family "two or three times, but they didn't respond to us."
A spokeswoman for coaching center where Akanksha studied said they only found out about her suicide after NPR sent questions to the center. She said the company would look for ways to support the family.
In the meantime, Akanksha's mother was mourning her daughter, while struggling with the reality of daily life. "We can't even light a cooking fire," she said. "I don't know how we are going to carry on."
Copyright 2026 NPR
