NEET-linked deaths hit highest level in 2025, data show

New Delhi,UPDATED: May 25, 2026 19:00 IST

In India, the dream of becoming a doctor is not always born inside a child. It is placed there subtly at first, then relentlessly, by parents, teachers, neighbours and a society that learns to measure a child’s worth by one question: can they become a doctor?

Countless children are fed this dream long before they can name it as their own. By the time many say they want to become doctors, the desire has already been shaped by years of family hope. That is what makes National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test(NEET-UG) one of the fiercest academic races in the country.

So when an exam touches over 20 lakh lives, its cancellation is not just a notice on a website. It enters homes, dinner-table conversations, hostel rooms and the minds of students.

An analysis of media reports by India Today’s OSINT team traced at least 93 NEET-linked reported student suicides in the last five years, peaking in 2025 with at least 32 deaths. In 2026 so far, at least 14 cases have already been documented.

Year by year data shows that reported NEET-linked student suicides rose from at least four cases in 2021 to nine in 2022, 14 in 2023, 19 in 2024 and at least 32 in 2025. The count has remained worrying in 2026, with at least 14 cases reported so far, including five since the exam cancellation was announced on May 12.

The cases include a 17-year-old from Curtorim in Goa on May 14; Ritik Mishra from Lakhimpur Kheri and Anshika Pandey from Delhi on May 15; Pradeep Meghwal from Jhunjhunu, Rajasthan, who died in Sikar on May 16; and Bhagyashree from Kalaburagi, Karnataka, on May 24.

A previous study published in 2021 in the Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine used a similar open-source review of online news reports to track NEET-linked suicides. The authors, Sujita Kumar Kar, Sagar Rai, Nivedita Sharma and Amit Singh, had identified 32 reported cases between January 2018 and September 2020: 11 in 2018, seven in 2019 and 14 up to September 2020.

The researchers used year-wise keyword mining across online news reports, followed by translation, deduplication and manual verification of identifiers such as name, age, location, native place and date of death.

Using the same framework, India Today traced at least 93 documented NEET-linked suicide cases between 2021 and 2026. Kota stood out as the main cluster, with at least 40 cases, followed by Patna with seven and Sikar with five.

An earlier India Today analysis found that Sikar performed better than Kota in the share of NEET-UG 2024 students scoring above 650 per coaching centre. Kota’s suicide toll, therefore, may be less about coaching “efficiency” and more about scale, the city’s dense coaching ecosystem and the volume of aspirants it draws each year.

The researchers also noted that while success stories are often glorified in society, student suicides are framed around failure. Such portrayals, they noted, can make failure appear final. They argued that students need to be taught how to cope with failure, frustration, peer pressure and family expectations, alongside stronger mental-health support.

The researchers also cautioned a blind spot: media reports can only capture what gets reported. Since the dataset relies on online news coverage, some deaths may never enter the public record. The real toll, therefore, may be higher.

Another striking pattern emerged from the data on students’ native states. Nearly one in five reported NEET-linked suicide cases involved students from Bihar (19.8%), followed by Rajasthan (18.7%), Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu (15.4% each), and Madhya Pradesh (8.8%).

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