The surge of campus suicides is a silent scream echoing off concrete hostel walls, one we can no longer afford to ignore or smother beneath well-intentioned policy. In 2025 alone, more than 13,000 Indian students died by suicide—7.6 percent of all national suicide cases, a rate that claims one young life almost every hour. We read about these tragedies often as fleeting news items, but rarely do we sit with their urgency and stare at their roots. Institutions search for answers, governments convene panels, yet mothers mourn, friends wonder, and those closest to the crisis—students—tread a terrain of isolation.
Into this discourse IIT Kharagpur has introduced ‘Campus Mothers’, an initiative intending to place women as anchors of emotional care for young adults battling competitive academia. On paper, the premise is warm, almost poetic: women from faculty households voluntarily trained to recognise student distress, reaching out and listening to struggles in unassuming, everyday moments. The institute reaffirms this is not a replacement for professional mental health services, merely a supplement, a gesture of home for students far from family and familiar comforts.
But what happens when good intentions collide with internalised patriarchy? What happens when the burden of emotional labour is once again thrust upon women—not as a celebrated choice, but in reflexive expectation? Like unpaid nurses, teachers, and confidantes, ‘campus mothers’ are assigned a role so naturalised it vanishes into invisibility. In this initiative, emotional labour is domesticated, feminised, and rendered a campus fixture, never quite named or acknowledged as labour or expertise. The programme arises urgent and experimental, but its design belongs to a social script centuries old: women as caregivers, mothers as emotional shock absorbers.
What troubles me—and should trouble us all—is not just the reproductive logic of gendered care, but the way it shifts the lens from systemic malaise to individual intervention. Are students suicidal because they lack maternal affection, or because institutional architectures remain inhospitable to emotional struggle? Twelve percent of Indian students admit to suicidal thoughts, and 6.7 percent confess prior attempts. Academic failure, toxic competition, and family strife propel young men and women to the brink, while mental health support remains woefully inadequate.
Faculty and administration are often ill-equipped to notice silent suffering, counselling services are stretched thin, and peer environments are toxically competitive. Instead of questioning why institutions fail, we outsource the emotional hope to ‘mothers’—never fathers, never paid professionals, assuming some inherited wisdom from motherhood will outwit the violence of loneliness, bullying, or discrimination.
Patriarchy internalises emotional labour as a woman’s duty so deeply that even progressive interventions risk reinforcing it. Campus mothers are trained, yes, and participation is voluntary. Yet, there is a presumption that women, by virtue of biological experience, know how to listen, absorb, and soothe. There’s no recognition of how women on campus already bear invisible burdens in both their professional and domestic spheres. This programme risks institutionalising those burdens rather than dismantling them. And when the labour is unpaid, informal, and often unrecognised, it fuses the worst of compliance culture with the soft violence of gender roles, reducing care to a free supplement instead of a rightful campus infrastructure.
What does it mean for the students themselves? Is the promise of an emotional anchor enough to shift the culture of silence and alienation? The trends are relentless: Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh lead in suicide numbers, and districts like Kota, with its infamous coaching centres, become epicentres of tragedy. We must not allow surface gestures to substitute for expensive, necessary reform. What students need are not only listening ears, but systemic change.
Mental health education must be woven into curriculums, not pasted as extra-curricular charity. Faculty should be trained not in the gendered art of mothering, but in active skills of emotional first-aid, gatekeeping, and empathetic leadership. Peer environments should reward camaraderie over competition. Professional counselling must be accessed on campus as a right, not a privilege or compensation gift after tragedy.
This is not to diminish the warmth or heroism of the women signing up for campus mothering, but to insist we see it for what it is: a band-aid on a wound that requires surgery. It is cognitive dissonance to call this progress while neglecting to fund counselling, ignoring the need for mental health professionals, or averting eyes from toxic hostels and relentless curriculum. If anything is to change, our approach to emotional labour must be radically transformed. First, by recognising its worth, next, by redistributing its load, and most importantly by professionalising care to treat mental health as a serious issue.
As I write, I am reminded of how quietly despair circulates, how rarely we witness its full force unless it lands in our backyard. Let this crisis urge us to build policies that recognise student vulnerability as a permanent condition of learning, not as a temporary inconvenience to be mothered away. Let Campus Mothers be a cautionary chapter. Grieve, critique, and act for those sorrowing in silence and those we have lost.
Thamizhachi Thangapandian | MP from South Chennai and member of the Standing Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth & Sports
(Views are personal)