Beyond the Meritocratic Facade: Structural Determinants, Caste-Based Institutional Stressors and the Political Economy of Student Suicides in India's Premier Institutions

Reservation has opened India’s most selective institutions to students whom law and custom long kept out. What happens to those students after admission has received far less legal attention. This article examines student suicide at the National Law Universities, the Indian Institutes of Technology and Management, and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences as a problem of institutional design and practice, and resists reducing it to private frailty. It identifies five patterns through which campus culture interacts with caste: meritocratic stigmatisation, social isolation, discretionary grading and linguistic alienation, the non-redressal of complaints, and financial destabilisation. It then turns to a pressure that cuts across caste lines, namely the gap between the academic level some students are expected to reach and the preparation they arrive with, made heavier by family expectation and peer comparison. Drawing on Gautam Bhatia’s idea of constitutional common sense and Aishwarya Singh’s review of his book, the article reads the record through three constitutional lenses and proposes an institutional duty of care under Article 21, built on Sukdeb Saha v State of Andhra Pradesh. It ends with reforms that favour independent, time-bound and data-publishing grievance bodies over new criminal offences. The evidence supports a patterned failure of institutional response. It does not prove that caste caused any particular death, and the article says so where it matters.