"Campus Death Renews Debate on Caste and Student Mental Health"
Social Identity Theory
part of self-worth comes from group membership, producing in-group favour and out-group suspicion
Diathesis-Stress Model
distress results from a stressor acting on a pre-existing vulnerability, not the stressor alone
Reservation policy under Articles 15(4) and 16(4) of the Constitution has widened access to India's elite technical institutes. The 103rd Constitutional Amendment extended this to Economically Weaker Sections. These measures reduced formal exclusion. But caste does not need legal sanction to operate. It survives by attaching itself to informal group identity: alma mater, department, hostel, and peer network, not caste alone. Research on caste's persistence shows it keeps reorganising into new associational forms, such as alumni networks and informal campus hierarchies, so formal legal equality can coexist with everyday social exclusion.
Two separate legal tracks exist for the two harms this creates. The Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 is the criminal-law route for caste-based humiliation, and it is under this Act that the current case is being investigated. The UGC (Promotion of Equity in Higher Educational Institutions) Regulations, 2012 separately require every institution to run an Equal Opportunity Cell and an SC/ST students' grievance cell. On mental health, the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017 created a statutory right to care, and the National Education Policy, 2020 made counselling mandatory in higher education. In practice, institutions rarely run these as genuinely separate systems; a single student-welfare response tends to cover both.
Two frameworks explain why identical events cause unequal harm. Social identity theory holds that part of a person's self-worth comes from group membership. Institutions, departments, and castes all generate in-group favour and out-group suspicion, even with no material trigger involved. A premier institute's own inaccessibility becomes a marker of status, and that status logic quietly imports the same hierarchy that caste already runs on. A student's caste identity is not activated by one incident on campus; it is simply reactivated by it.
The diathesis-stress model, used in clinical psychology, adds a second layer. Distress is produced when a stressor acts on a pre-existing vulnerability, not by the stressor alone. …
Caste system is assuming new identities and associational forms. Hence, caste system cannot be eradicated in India. Comment.
Explain why suicide among young women is increasing in Indian society.
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