A nationwide survey by a task force appointed by India's Supreme Court found that 9% of higher-education students often or very often had suicidal thoughts in the past year, and 15% recalled a recent stretch of severe distress. The survey drew more than 243,000 responses, and about a third of respondents said they felt like outsiders on campus, though officials stress the sample is not representative and the findings are preliminary. The results come amid outrage over student deaths at IIT Delhi and IIT Bombay (elite engineering institutes), and will feed into the panel's final report due by 31 October 2026.