Harassment, alienation and depression: Life of students shouldering family dream of better future

At around 6.30am every morning, this quiet Indian city suddenly springs to life with hundreds of thousands of young students emerging from their hostels to rush to a cluster of big teaching centres. Aside from the early hour, this could be any university town in the world. Except India’s Kota – three times the size of Manchester – is not offering higher education, but rather the hope of it in the future.

Stripped of green spaces, communal areas or anything else not strictly related to teaching, the buildings these students rush to are coaching centres, not colleges. Their names are imprinted on the T-shirts, bags and books of each student, as well as across the big billboards that jostle for space above the city’s streets.

These centres sell the dream of beating the notoriously competitive entrance exams for medical and engineering courses at premier government institutes, drawing some 200,000 teens every year who carry with them the weight of their families’ hopes of securing a better future.

For some, however, the pressure of clearing the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) and National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET), for engineering and medicine respectively, is too much to bear. This year Kota has been forced to reckon with the deaths by suicide of 27 coaching centre students, with the last two coming in late November. It is the highest rate this district in Rajasthan has seen since 2015.

Manjot Singh, 18, would often joke about