‘They have not come here to die’: An epidemic of student suicides plagues India’s National Law Universities
Once hailed as “islands of excellence,” a three-year study by The Leaflet shows that NLUs are marked by poor health infrastructure and weak preventive safeguards — with more to be done for greater inclusion of marginalised communities and mental health support.
Rusham
1 March 2026
ON A WINTER EVENING in January 2024, Amruta, a student of National Law University (‘NLU’) Delhi, and I were discussing our respective experiences in NLUs - India’s premier semi-autonomous public law schools, considered the zenith of legal education by India’s institutional ranking frameworks. “Islands of excellence,” the ex-prime minister Manmohan Singh had said about them in 2007, “in a sea of mediocrity."
For a brief duration in my life in 2023, I was a student in Hidayatullah National Law University, Raipur. That time had not felt so brief at all - I had experienced trolling, eye-rolls, felt the toxic competitiveness that permeated the atmosphere (at one point, a student had asked me to leave the University as I did not belong there). I had scraped through only two months of law school in Raipur when a final year student - Urvi Bhardwaj - took her own life on that campus.
For a long time after, many of us would wake up to students in our hostel going through panic attacks, emotional meltdowns, and distress. The college administration, on the other hand, started visiting every student’s room each morning to ensure that everyone was “safe”. As the usual, bare minimum protocol, but perhaps with the misunderstanding that it was something profound, the administration plastered the contact information of the college psychologist everywhere. My friends would often tell me how they felt surveilled, and how no constructive steps were taken by the University to ensure the health of students.
Urvi’s passing moved something inside me. The apathy towards students that followed felt like the final nail in the coffin.
Urvi’s passing moved something inside me. The apathy towards students that followed felt like the final nail in the coffin. I knew I had to leave; thankfully, I did leave, shortly later. Even as I left the campus, I knew that it would take me a long time to process my months there. When I was back at home in Delhi, I met Amruta. On talking to her, I realized that this was not simply the story of one NLU – there were larger, systematic lapses at play. Amruta told me that she was also constantly bullied, faced casteism and discriminatory treatment by students and professors alike, and felt like she did not belong there.
I remember being on a bus ride with her, sharing poetry, laughing at how students at our colleges bullied us for having “naive interests.” One thing stood out as common between us: ‘We did not even want to belong’. Both of us wanted to belong to fairer, more inclusionary, healthier spaces.
On September 4, 2024, Amruta died of suicide within the premise of NLU, Delhi.
The college administration was particularly aware of Amruta’s mental health condition, certain sources informed me, even prior to this incident. Tragically, not much long after we lost Amruta, two first year students - Khushil and Shreyasi - passed away. This meant that NLU Delhi had witnessed the death of three students in a month, all three of whom were less than twenty years old.