By Dr. Mushtaq Rather

Not long ago, in Anantnag, a young girl preparing for NEET died by suicide. She was just 18. She had left the familiarity of home for the promise of Kota, India’s coaching capital, where thousands of students chase dreams shaped by the alphabet soup of JEE, NEET, and UPSC.

Her life ended in silence, just another number in a long, grim list of suicides that has turned Kota into something darker: a city of sorrow.

This wasn’t the first tragedy, and, heartbreakingly, it won’t be the last.

So far this year, at least 15 students have taken their lives in Kota. The Supreme Court recently asked the Rajasthan government what, if anything, had been done. But the real question runs deeper: how did we let things get this far?

We now live in an academic culture where “going to school” has become an afterthought, even an inconvenience.

Children as young as 14 are pulled from classrooms and placed into coaching centers with military precision. They wake before dawn, study until night, and see the world not in experiences, but in multiple-choice questions.

In Jammu and Kashmir, as in many parts of India, senior secondary students skip school altogether, enrolling instead in private coaching centers while maintaining what are, in essence, ghost admissions in their schools.

This arrangement is mutually beneficial. Private schools pocket monthly tuition fees and celebrate the students’ exam........

© Kashmir Observer