The Race to the Start: With Lives at Stake

Lakhs of students in India dream the same dream every night: a dream of securing a seat in a government engineering or medical college. The road to this dream is fiercely competitive and challenging, both mentally and physically. Our aspiring teenagers pour their heart and soul into these exams, and so many of them just reach a dead end.

The success rate for top institutes like IIT is just 1%, while just 4 to 5% of students get a seat in a government medical college. Intense pressure during the preparation years, culminating in failure, can lead to devastating consequences. The coaching capital of India, Kota, has witnessed more than 45 student suicides in the last two years. NCRB data records 13,089 student suicides in 2021, averaging one every hour.

These numbers leave us with questions that bog our minds. Why are we pushing so many students to death? Where are parents, teachers, and the education system going wrong?

Let’s first examine some more numbers that hold the key to this race the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) for medical admissions and the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) for engineering.

The Systematic Problem: 

The massive gap of lakh­s of aspirants vs. limited seats creates a built-in failure rate.

NEET (Medical Admissions):

• Total Applicants: For the NEET UG 2024 exam, approximately 23.33 lakh (2.33 million) students appeared. 
• Total MBBS Seats: As per the National Medical Commission (NMC)’s revised UG seat matrix for 2025-26, there are a total of 1,18,190 MBBS seats available across 780 medical colleges (both government and private) in India. This includes institutions like AIIMS and JIPMER.
  • Out of these, around 91,927 seats are in government medical colleges (based on 2024 data).
• Even with private college seats included, the ratio of qualified students v/s seats is a big challenge. For the NEET UG 2025 exam, approximately 12.36 lakh students cleared the exam, but only 1.18 lakh MBBS seats are available.

JEE (Engineering Admissions):

• Total Unique Applicants (JEE Main 2024): Approximately 14.76 lakh (1.47 million) unique candidates registered for both sessions (January/April) of JEE Main 2024.
• Total Seats in IITs, NITs, IIITs, and GFTIs:
  • IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology): Approximately 17,760 seats (as per JoSAA 2024 seat matrix).
  • NITs (National Institutes of Technology): Approximately 24,229 seats.
  • IIITs (Indian Institutes of Information Technology): Approximately 8,546 seats.
  • GFTIs (Government Funded Technical Institutes): Approximately 9,402 seats.
  • Combined Total: Around 60,000+ seats across these premier institutions.
• For the combined pool of IITs, NITs, IIITs, and GFTIs, the ratio of applicants to available seats in JEE Main 2024 was approximately 22:1.

For every seat, in both cases, there are dozens of aspirants. This scenario throws the brightest students into a dungeon of excessive competition, self-doubt and fear of failure.

The Pressure Cooker: Academic Stress and Its Consequences

The sheer volume of competition, coupled with societal and parental expectations, transforms the preparation for NEET and JEE into an unparalleled pressure cooker.

Academic Overload: The syllabus for both exams is vast and demanding. Students often spend 10-14 hours a day studying, attending coaching classes, and solving practice papers. This leaves little to no time for recreational activities, hobbies, or adequate rest. 

Parental Expectations & Fear of Failure: The low success rates lead students to internalise fear, resulting in immense anxiety, self-doubt, and a constant feeling of inadequacy.

Parents, who often have invested significant financial and emotional resources in their children’s education and coaching, place immense pressure on them to succeed. The desire to make one’s parents proud, or the fear of disappointing them, can become a heavy burden.

Peer Pressure and Social Comparison: In a highly competitive peer group, students constantly compare their performance in mock tests and internal assessments. Social media further exacerbates this, creating an idealised image of success that can lead to feelings of worthlessness if one falls short.

Coaching Culture: A money-making culture that is eating away at the growth of a child, some brands are pushing parents to start coaching children from the 6th standard. The mushrooming of coaching centres is nothing but business models exploiting people’s desire for a settled life. Hubs like Kota have created a parallel ecosystem, while they provide structured preparation, they often make an even more stressful environment. A place that is full of rigorous schedules, competitive internal rankings, and a singular focus on exam performance, all at the expense of holistic development. As a career counsellor, I have met students in Koat after a series of suicide cases there. A look into those emotionless is enough to send shivers down your spine. The emphasis on these two exams as the sole gateway to a “successful” future in medicine or engineering fosters an “all or nothing” mentality. Alternative career paths or opportunities are often downplayed, ignored or undervalued, making failure in these exams seem like the end of the world.

Consequences of Pressure:

The relentless pressure takes a severe toll on the mental and physical health of teenagers:

• Mental Health Issues: Anxiety, depression, chronic stress, emotional instability, and mood swings are increasingly common among NEET and JEE aspirants. Sleep deprivation, poor diet, and lack of physical activity further worsen these conditions. 
• Physical Ailments: Students frequently report experiencing headaches, back pain, eye strain, digestive issues, and weakened immune systems due to intense academic stress.
• Loss of Self-Confidence: Repeated failures in mock tests or perceived shortcomings can erode a student’s self-confidence, leading to a negative mindset that hinders further progress.
• Social Isolation: The demanding schedule often leads to social isolation, as students are cut off from friends and family, further exacerbating feelings of loneliness and distress.

Tragic Outcome: Suicides in Teenagers

The most devastating consequence of this life-threatening career race is the alarming rise in student suicides. Data from various sources, including RTI responses and NCRB reports, paints a grim picture:

• A recent RTI response revealed that over the past five years (up to early 2025), 119 medical students in India tragically died by suicide, with 64 undergraduate and 55 postgraduate students.
• The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data indicates a disturbing trend. In 2020, one student took their own life every 42 minutes, averaging 34 student suicides per day. In 2021, over 13,000 students died by suicide, a 4.5% increase from the previous year.
• In prominent coaching hubs like Kota, Rajasthan, where thousands of students flock for NEET/JEE preparation, suicide cases have become a regular occurrence, sparking national concern. These incidents mostly occur due to academic pressure, fear of failure, and the inability to adapt to the rigorous academic environment. 
• A 2024 Lokniti-CSDS survey in Kota found that students endure 6–8 hours of coaching per day, experience feelings of loneliness, fatigue, and depression, with severely disrupted sleep patterns.

These statistics underscore a mental health crisis within the student community, highlighting the urgent need for systemic changes.

Who is Responsible for this Life-Threatening Career Race?

The responsibility for this life-threatening career race is multifaceted. There is a complex interplay of various stakeholders:

The Education System and Policy Makers:
Limited Seats and High Demand: The fundamental imbalance between the aspirational demand for professional courses and the limited number of quality seats in government institutions creates an inherently competitive environment. Although efforts to increase the number of seats are underway, the growth often lags behind the surge in aspirants.

Over-reliance on Single Exams: The system’s almost exclusive reliance on a single, high-stakes entrance examination (NEET/JEE) as the sole determinant of admission, largely disregarding Class XII board scores, forces students into an “all or nothing” mindset. This often leads to students neglecting holistic learning for rote memorisation and exam-specific drills.

Lack of Holistic Assessment: The current evaluation system primarily tests a student’s ability to perform in a high-pressure, time-bound exam rather than assessing their genuine aptitude, passion, or well-rounded personality.

Unrealistic Expectations: Many parents, driven by a desire for their children’s success and often influenced by societal norms, place immense and sometimes unrealistic expectations on their children. The pursuit of “doctor” or “engineer” status can overshadow a child’s interests and capabilities. Many parents lack the mindset to understand the academic stress, anxiety, or depression that their children face.

Coaching Centres & Dummy School Culture:

Commercialisation of Education: The coaching industry, a multi-crore business, thrives in a competitive environment. While they claim to provide specialised training, many prioritise results and rankings, often pushing students beyond their limits with rigorous schedules, intense competition, and a focus on “cracking” the exam rather than genuine learning.

Dummy Schools: The proliferation of dummy schools, where students are enrolled to meet attendance requirements but spend most of their time in coaching, detaches students from a typical school environment and peer interactions that are crucial for their development. 

Glorification of Certain Professions: This is by far the biggest. As a career guidance expert, I have come across cases where we see that a child cannot or does not want to pursue science for JEE or NEET, but the sheer fear and insecurity of getting fewer opportunities is so huge that they take the plunge.

A prevalent culture of comparison, where their academic achievements and career choices are judged, adds to the burden, confirming the predefined notions of success.

The Way Ahead:

Career Guidance: Many parents and teachers believe that a career in science is the only route to success. Many students appearing for JEE and NEET have no idea which engineer or doctor they want to be, nor are they aware of other career options available to them based on the subjects they studied in 11th and 12th grade. They get stuck in the race of numbers from class 10th onwards, based on which they enter the science stream. Their goal is to pass the exam and do whatever comes their way; no wonder we, as a nation, are producing average doctors and engineers who are in the profession just to earn money.

Career guidance in class 10th can help students make better choices and build a stronger foundation. It can help them find careers that suit their personality and align with their interests rather than just their aptitude.

Each year, over 20 lakh students vie for 1–2 lakh seats in NEET and JEE, and the fallout extends beyond failed exams: it costs young lives. Until systemic reforms and cultural shifts occur, this life-threatening rat race will persist, with more vulnerable adolescents caught in its grip.