There is a particular silence that falls over an examination hall in India that you do not encounter in quite the same way anywhere else in the world. It is not merely the silence of concentration. It is the silence of something larger and heavier — the accumulated weight of family expectation, of years of preparation, of the knowledge that this room, this paper, this two-hour window represents, for many of the students sitting in it, the singular verdict on their worth as a person and their prospects as a human being.
India produces approximately 1.5 million engineers every year. It sends more students abroad for higher education than almost any other country. Its examination systems are among the most competitive on the planet — the IIT Joint Entrance Examination, widely regarded as one of the most difficult undergraduate entrance tests in the world, attracted over 1.8 million registrations in 2023 for approximately 17,000 seats. The Coaching industry that prepares students for this examination — concentrated in cities like Kota in Rajasthan — is estimated at over $4 billion annually. Hundreds of thousands of adolescents leave their families, their friends, and their home towns to spend years in this system, preparing for a test that most of them will not pass.
What the silence in that examination hall contains is not just ambition. It contains anxiety, loneliness, sleep deprivation, identity fragility, and — in a number of cases each year whose public reporting is almost certainly an undercount — despair so profound that it ends in tragedy. A study published in The Lancet estimated India’s suicide rate among young people at levels that place it among the highest in the world for the age group, with academic pressure consistently cited as a significant contributing factor. The National Crime Records Bureau data on student suicides makes for difficult reading.
These are not the failures of individual students. They are the outputs of a system — an educational and cultural system — that has, with the best of intentions, confused the metrics of achievement with the substance of a flourishing life. And they are, the science of happiness clearly shows, addressable. Not by softening standards or retreating from excellence, but by understanding what human beings — including very talented, very ambitious young human beings — actually need in order to thrive.
The word burnout has acquired a certain fashionable vagueness in contemporary culture, applied to everything from a bad week at work to genuine psychological collapse. In the clinical literature, however, burnout is a specific syndrome with specific components: emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation (a detached, going-through-the-motions quality in one’s engagement with work or study), and a reduced sense of personal accomplishment. It was originally described by Herbert Freudenberger in 1974 and subsequently operationalised by Christina Maslach, whose Maslach Burnout Inventory has become the standard research instrument in the field.
When researchers apply this framework to Indian university students, what they find is consistent and alarming. A 2021 study by Balaji Motamarri and colleagues, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, found significant levels of burnout among Indian medical students, with emotional exhaustion as the dominant dimension. Studies of engineering students — a population under comparable competitive pressure — show similar patterns. Research by the NIMHANS (National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences) in Bengaluru has consistently documented elevated rates of anxiety and depression among Indian college students, with academic pressure, competitive stress, and perceived lack of social support among the most frequently cited contributors.
What is particularly striking about the Indian student burnout picture is the role of what researchers call the “achievement-identity fusion” — the degree to which a young person’s sense of their own worth has become inseparable from their academic performance. When identity and performance are fused in this way, every examination becomes an existential event. A poor result is not merely a disappointing outcome to be learned from and recovered from. It is, at the level of felt experience, a verdict on the person — a confirmation of the fear that they are, at some deep level, not enough.
Suniya Luthar at Arizona State University, whose research on high-achieving school environments in the United States documented elevated rates of anxiety, depression, and substance use in affluent, academically pressured communities, has noted the universality of this pattern across cultures: the environments that most intensively reward performance tend also to produce the highest levels of psychological fragility in the face of failure. The Indian context adds a layer that Luthar’s American research does not fully capture: the degree to which academic achievement is understood not merely as personal success but as familial duty — a debt to parents who have sacrificed, a source of social status for the entire family, a obligation that cannot be negotiated or deferred without profound shame.
If burnout is the presenting problem, belonging is the deeper one — and it is here that the happiness research has some of its most consequential findings for Indian universities.
Gregory Walton and Geoffrey Cohen at Stanford University conducted a landmark series of studies on what they called “social belonging uncertainty” — the experience of not knowing whether one truly belongs in a particular academic community. Their research found that this uncertainty, even when mild and temporary, had measurable negative effects on academic performance, motivation, and wellbeing — and that these effects were significantly larger in students who were members of groups with cultural histories of marginalisation or exclusion. The intervention that counteracted these effects was remarkably simple: brief, structured exposure to the information that belonging uncertainty is normal and temporary, and that it tends to resolve over time. Students who received this information showed significant improvements in grades, wellbeing, and retention over multi-year follow-up periods. The effect of a single belonging affirmation, maintained through the mechanism of normalisation, persisted for years.
For Indian students, belonging uncertainty takes several specific forms that the research literature has not always fully addressed. There is the belonging uncertainty of the first-generation university student — the child of parents who never attended university, navigating a social and intellectual world for which their family experience provides no map. There is the belonging uncertainty of the student who has left home for the first time, often moving to a city far from their family and community, living among strangers with different backgrounds and different assumed knowledge. There is the belonging uncertainty of the student whose medium of instruction is English when it was not the language of their home — who must simultaneously learn what is being taught and negotiate the social codes of a language that carries, in the Indian context, a freight of class and aspiration that far exceeds its purely communicative function.
And there is a belonging uncertainty that is specific to the highest-pressure academic environments — the IITs, the IIMs, the AIIMS — where students who were the most exceptional in their school, their district, and often their state arrive to discover that every person around them was similarly exceptional, and that the relative standing that once confirmed their identity has dissolved. The psychologist Barry Schwartz has written about what happens to students who were accustomed to being the best when they enter environments where being the best is the baseline expectation: the experience is not merely humbling but identity-destabilising, and it produces a particularly acute form of belonging uncertainty that the research shows takes, on average, longer than most students expect to resolve.
The Indian philosophical tradition has been grappling with questions of identity, purpose, and the right relationship between effort and outcome for millennia — and it offers resources for the current crisis that are both culturally resonant for Indian students and remarkably consonant with what the contemporary science of happiness has independently established.
The Bhagavad Gita‘s central teaching — delivered, with characteristic philosophical intensity, on a battlefield to a warrior paralysed by anxiety about the consequences of his actions — is precisely the teaching that the achievement-identity-fused student most needs and most struggles to receive. Nishkama Karma — action without attachment to outcome — is not the counsel of indifference to results. It is the counsel of a different relationship to results: one in which the effort, the quality of engagement, and the integrity of the action are the student’s responsibility, while the outcome is acknowledged as beyond their complete control. This is not passivity or resignation. It is, as the Gita frames it, the highest form of engagement — the action that is fully committed precisely because it is free from the paralysing weight of existential stakes.
Contemporary psychology has arrived at a remarkably similar conclusion from a different direction. Carol Dweck’s research on growth mindset at Stanford demonstrates that students who understand ability as developed through effort rather than fixed at birth are significantly more resilient in the face of failure, more likely to take on challenging tasks, and more likely to sustain motivation over time compared to students who believe their intelligence is a fixed trait that results confirm or disconfirm. The student who approaches the JEE with a growth mindset — who understands a difficult problem not as evidence of their inadequacy but as the condition under which their intelligence is being developed — is engaging in a secular translation of Nishkama Karma that the Gita would recognise immediately.
Svadharma — the concept of one’s own particular path or calling — offers a complementary resource. The Gita’s insistence that it is better to perform one’s own dharma imperfectly than to perform another’s dharma with technical excellence is a direct challenge to the one-size-fits-all meritocracy of the competitive examination system, which sorts students along a single axis and assigns them life trajectories on the basis of their performance on that axis. Svadharma says: the engineer who was meant to be a poet is not a failed engineer. They are a poet who has not yet found their way. The student who does not make the IIT cutoff has not been assigned a lesser destiny. They have been redirected toward a path that is, in the tradition’s understanding, uniquely theirs.
This is not wishful thinking. It is a claim about the nature of human fulfilment that the happiness research has consistently supported: Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory, one of the most robustly evidenced frameworks in motivational psychology, shows that human beings flourish when their activities align with their genuine interests and values — what the theory calls autonomous motivation — and wither when they are engaged in activities primarily to meet external expectations or avoid social consequences — what the theory calls controlled motivation. The student studying engineering because they genuinely love the problems is in a fundamentally different psychological situation from the student studying engineering because their parents expect it and the culture rewards it. The research is unambiguous about which student will flourish.
The happiness research, combined with the specific data on Indian student wellbeing, points to several areas where Indian universities — even the most prestigious and well-resourced — are systematically failing their students.
The first is mental health infrastructure at scale. Most Indian universities, including elite institutions, have counselling facilities that are grossly insufficient for the actual demand. A counsellor-to-student ratio of 1:10,000 is not uncommon at larger public universities, compared to the American Psychological Association’s recommended ratio of 1:1,500 for college campuses. Beyond the numbers, the cultural stigma attached to seeking psychological help in India — the perception that mental health difficulties represent personal weakness, family failure, or social risk — means that even where services exist, they are dramatically underutilised. Research consistently shows that the majority of students who experience significant psychological distress never seek help from formal services.
The second is the almost complete absence of emotional wellbeing education as a structured curricular offering. Indian universities teach students to solve differential equations, to analyse literary texts, to understand organic chemistry — but they do not, as a general practice, teach students how to manage their own minds. The skills of emotional regulation, the capacity to build and maintain meaningful relationships, the practices of gratitude and self-compassion, the understanding of what the science of happiness says about what actually produces a good life — these are not incidental to a university education. They are, the research suggests, its most consequential content. And they are almost entirely absent from the formal curriculum of Indian higher education.
The third is the structural isolation that many Indian campuses inadvertently produce. The residential university model, where it exists, can be a powerful environment for belonging — or a powerful environment for loneliness, depending on how it is designed and what values it cultivates. Research on peer relationships in university contexts consistently shows that the quality of social connection — the degree to which students feel genuinely known and valued by at least a few people — is among the strongest predictors of academic persistence, mental health, and long-term wellbeing. Yet the culture of many Indian engineering and medical campuses — intensely competitive, stratified by academic performance, and often hostile to the expression of vulnerability — actively works against the formation of the deep, honest friendships that the Harvard Adult Development Study, among other long-running research programmes, identifies as the single most important contributor to a flourishing life.
The fourth is the absence of meaningful mentorship. Research by Nicholas Yoder and colleagues on the importance of caring adult relationships for adolescent and young adult wellbeing is consistent: the presence of even one adult who genuinely knows and cares about a student — who is interested in their development as a whole person rather than merely their academic performance — is a significant protective factor against the psychological deterioration that high-pressure environments produce. Faculty-student ratios at many Indian universities, particularly public institutions, make this kind of relationship difficult at scale. But the evidence suggests it is worth making difficult things possible.
The Harvard Adult Development Study — the longest longitudinal study of adult life in the history of social science — followed two cohorts across 85 years and found that the quality of relationships was the strongest predictor of who would flourish in old age. Not income, not academic credentials, not social status, not even physical health at baseline. Relationships. The warmth, depth, and reliability of human connection was the variable that, more than any other, separated those who thrived from those who merely endured.
For Indian students, the conditions for this quality of connection are often structurally impeded. The academic calendar is relentless. The evaluation culture rewards individual performance and, in some environments, discourages the kind of honest, vulnerable conversation in which deep friendship is forged. The cultural context adds its own pressures: the gendered expectations that shape what young men and women are permitted to express, the caste and class dynamics that complicate the formation of genuine cross-group friendships, the distance from family that for many students means the loss of their primary attachment relationships without adequate replacement.
The Japanese concept of Moai — the Okinawan practice of forming a small, committed social group that meets regularly and provides mutual support across the full span of life — offers a model worth considering. The longevity research on Okinawan communities suggests that Moai groups are a significant contributor to the extraordinary health and wellbeing outcomes documented there. What Moai provides is not social networking but social belonging: the experience of being genuinely known, genuinely seen, and genuinely supported by a small group of people who are committed to each other’s flourishing over time.
African Ubuntu philosophy — I am because we are — articulates the same principle from a different cultural location: that personhood is relational, that the self is constituted through its connections to others, and that a community in which any member is suffering diminishes the whole. For Indian students navigating the atomising pressures of competitive academic environments, Ubuntu offers a counter-narrative to the meritocratic individualism that the system reinforces: you are not in competition with the person sitting next to you. Their flourishing is part of yours.
The concept of Seva — selfless service — in the Indian tradition offers a third angle on the belonging question. Research on prosocial behaviour by Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton at Harvard Business School consistently finds that spending time and resources on others produces significantly greater wellbeing than equivalent investment in oneself. The university that provides students with structured opportunities for community contribution — through social work, peer support, environmental projects, or service to disadvantaged communities — is not distracting them from their studies. It is giving them one of the most powerful wellbeing interventions available, while also building the sense of meaning and connection that the happiness research identifies as foundational to human flourishing.
The question of what universities owe their students is, ultimately, a philosophical question — one that Indian higher education has not always engaged with as explicitly as the situation now demands.
The modern Indian university was substantially shaped by a colonial inheritance that prized examination performance, administrative efficiency, and the production of workers for particular economic functions. This inheritance has been adapted but not fundamentally transformed by independence. The IIT system, for all its genuine brilliance, was designed to produce engineers for a developing economy. The MBBS system was designed to produce doctors. The assumption underlying both — that the university’s purpose is the production of certified competence in a specific domain — is increasingly at odds with what the research on human flourishing suggests a university education should do.
What the happiness research proposes, and what the Rekhi Foundation for Happiness has built its educational work upon, is a different model: the university as a site for the cultivation of the whole person — the intellectual, emotional, social, and ethical dimensions of human development — alongside the development of specific professional competencies. This is not a soft or sentimental model. It is supported by decades of research showing that emotionally intelligent, socially connected, psychologically resilient graduates outperform their equivalently credentialled but less flourishing peers on virtually every meaningful professional and personal metric over time.
The Science of Happiness Course, now offered at more than 50 universities across six countries including several Indian institutions, is the Rekhi Foundation’s concrete translation of this insight into pedagogy. It teaches students the evidence-based practices — gratitude, self-compassion, mindfulness training, the understanding of what positive psychology research actually shows about the determinants of wellbeing — that Indian universities have almost entirely left out of the curriculum. It gives students a language and a framework for their inner lives at the precise developmental moment when those inner lives are being most intensively formed. And it does so not as an extracurricular supplement but as a credit-bearing academic subject — a signal that emotional wellbeing education belongs at the centre of what a university education is for.
The early research on the course’s effects is consistent with the broader happiness research literature: students who complete structured positive psychology education report significant improvements in life satisfaction, reductions in anxiety and depression, stronger social connections, and greater sense of meaning and purpose. These are not trivial outcomes. For a population in which a significant minority is struggling with burnout, loneliness, and identity fragility, they represent the difference between a university experience that leaves lasting damage and one that leaves lasting foundations.
The case for institutional change is strong and urgent. But the science of happiness is equally clear that individual agency — the practices and orientations that students can cultivate for themselves, regardless of what their institution provides — is a genuine and significant source of wellbeing.
Martin Seligman’s research across populations in high-pressure environments consistently shows that a substantial portion of individual wellbeing — Sonja Lyubomirsky estimates approximately 40 per cent — is influenced by intentional activity: what people deliberately choose to do and practise, independent of their circumstances. This is not a counsel to accept inadequate institutional support or to privatise what are genuinely structural problems. It is the recognition that even in difficult circumstances, students are not powerless.
A daily gratitude practice — the specific, deliberate noting of one or two things that happened in the past 24 hours that the student is genuinely glad occurred — has an evidence base going back to Robert Emmons’ foundational research at the University of California, Davis. It costs nothing, requires no institutional support, and produces measurable improvements in positive affect, prosocial behaviour, and resilience over time. A commitment to one genuine, honest conversation per week — a conversation in which the student says something true about how they are actually doing, to someone they trust — is among the most protective things a student can do for their own mental health in an environment that rewards performed confidence over authentic vulnerability.
Physical movement, adequate sleep, and the protection of some portion of the day from academic demands are not luxuries or self-indulgences. They are, as the neuroscience of learning and wellbeing makes unambiguously clear, prerequisites for the cognitive performance that the student is striving to achieve. The student who sleeps six hours to study for two more is, as Matthew Walker’s sleep research shows, making their studying less effective while degrading the emotional regulation and stress resilience they need to sustain the effort over time. This is not a trade-off. It is a loss on both sides.
And the practice of asking — asking for help, asking for connection, asking for mentorship — is the individual act most consistently associated in the research with better outcomes in high-pressure academic environments. The culture that discourages this asking is doing students harm. The students who resist that culture, who ask anyway, are doing themselves the most important kind of good.
Indian students are not fragile. This is important to say clearly and without qualification. The young people sitting in that examination hall, carrying the weight of family expectation and years of preparation, are among the most determined, most intellectually capable, and most resilient human beings in the world. The burnout and the loneliness and the belonging uncertainty are not evidence of weakness. They are the predictable outputs of an environment that has asked extraordinary things of young people while providing inadequate support for the human beings doing the extraordinary things.
What Indian students deserve from their universities is not the removal of challenge. Challenge is the condition under which the most important growth happens. What they deserve is an environment that takes their inner lives as seriously as their examination results — that provides the mental health support, the belonging infrastructure, the emotional wellbeing education, and the mentorship that the science of happiness clearly shows are not supplements to a good education but its essential foundations.
The distance between what is and what should be is not small. But it is not as large as despair might suggest. The research is clear. The practices are available. The evidence that they work — in Indian contexts as in every other — is substantial and growing. And the cost of continuing to leave this work undone is, as the data on student distress already shows, one that Indian higher education cannot afford to keep paying.
The research suggests both: high academic pressure is harmful wherever it exists, and the Indian context has specific features that intensify the effect. Suniya Luthar's research at Arizona State University, conducted primarily in high-achieving American environments, documents elevated rates of anxiety, depression, and substance use in academically pressured communities compared to national norms — a finding that holds across cultures. What the Indian context adds is a particular combination of factors that the research identifies as especially potent. First, the concentration of competition into a small number of high-stakes examinations — unlike educational systems with multiple pathways and regular assessment — means that the consequences of any single performance are perceived as life-defining. Second, the familial and social weight attached to educational achievement in India is, by most cross-cultural comparisons, unusually heavy: academic success is not merely personal but a source of family honour and social standing, which means that failure carries shame consequences that extend well beyond the individual. Third, the infrastructure for support — counselling services, mental health literacy, cultural permission to seek help — is significantly less developed than in countries with comparable levels of academic pressure, such as South Korea, Japan, or Singapore, all of which have their own crisis conversations about examination culture. The happiness research is clear that pressure without support, and performance without belonging, are the combination most likely to produce burnout and psychological deterioration. India's educational system has historically provided the pressure in abundance while systematically under-providing the support. This is the specific problem that emotional wellbeing education and institutional reform can address.
The relationship is real but far more limited than the achievement-focused educational culture assumes. Income and academic credentials do predict wellbeing up to a point — the point at which basic material security is achieved — but above that threshold, their marginal contribution to life satisfaction diminishes sharply while the contribution of relationships, meaning, autonomy, and positive emotional experience continues to grow. The World Happiness Report data, drawn from Gallup surveys across 150 countries, consistently shows that the countries with the highest life satisfaction scores are not the countries with the highest GDP or the most credentialled workforces. They are the countries with the highest social trust, the strongest social support systems, and the greatest freedom to make meaningful life choices. At the individual level, the Harvard Adult Development Study's 85-year longitudinal finding is definitive: the quality of relationships, not the level of achievement, is the strongest predictor of who flourishes in the long run. This does not mean that academic achievement is unimportant. It means that the weight the Indian educational system places on it — as the primary, and in some environments the sole, determinant of a young person's worth and future — is grossly disproportionate to what the evidence shows achievement actually contributes to a flourishing life. The student who graduates with strong academic credentials and strong relationships, a sense of purpose, and the emotional foundations that positive psychology identifies as central to wellbeing is in a vastly better position for the decades ahead than the student who has the credentials alone.
The research on belonging interventions is, on this point, genuinely encouraging: some of the most effective belonging-building practices are also among the most scalable. Gregory Walton and Geoffrey Cohen's social belonging intervention — a 45-minute exercise in which students read and reflect on testimonials from senior students describing how they overcame initial belonging uncertainty — produced effects on academic performance and wellbeing that persisted over multi-year follow-up periods. The mechanism is not complexity but normalisation: the communication, at the beginning of a student's university career, that feeling uncertain about whether you belong is universal, temporary, and not predictive of how you will feel in a year. Peer mentoring programmes, in which senior students are trained and supported to build genuine relationships with juniors, have similarly strong evidence bases and can operate at scale with modest institutional investment. The Moai model — the deliberate formation of small, structured peer groups committed to mutual support — can be built into orientation programmes and maintained through minimal but consistent institutional scaffolding. The Rekhi Foundation's Science of Happiness Course itself functions as a belonging intervention, precisely because it creates the conditions in which students discuss their inner lives honestly and discover — often with considerable relief — that the anxiety, the loneliness, and the identity uncertainty they have been privately carrying are not personal failures but shared human experiences. The research on what builds belonging consistently shows that it is less about grand institutional gestures than about the repeated, structured creation of conditions in which students experience genuine mutual recognition — the sense of being seen, known, and valued as a person rather than as a performance.
The evidence suggests they are not merely relevant but potentially more resonant for Indian students than the predominantly Western frameworks that dominate the positive psychology literature. The concepts of Nishkama Karma, Svadharma, Svadhyaya, and Seva are not abstractions for students who have grown up in households where these ideas, even if not named in Sanskrit, have shaped the moral and emotional atmosphere of family life. When a student encounters the Bhagavad Gita's teaching on action without attachment to outcome in the context of a science of happiness course, they are not meeting a foreign idea. They are meeting a familiar one with new intellectual scaffolding — and the research on culturally congruent wellbeing interventions suggests that this recognition significantly enhances both engagement and efficacy. Svadhyaya — honest self-observation, the compassionate examination of one's own patterns and reactions — is, in the Indian tradition, understood as the foundation of personal development. Contemporary positive psychology's emphasis on metacognition, reflective functioning, and self-compassion is, in large measure, an independent Western arrival at the same insight. For Indian students, the opportunity to encounter these ideas in their original cultural context — as part of a rich philosophical tradition that their own civilisation produced — offers something beyond their psychological utility. It offers a relationship to their own heritage that the contemporary educational system, with its predominantly Western epistemological framework, rarely provides. The happiness research on cultural identity and wellbeing suggests that a secure, positive relationship to one's cultural heritage is itself a protective factor — and that educational environments that honour and engage with students' cultural traditions, rather than treating them as irrelevant to the serious business of modern education, are better for their students' flourishing.
The most important thing the research says is this: what you are experiencing is not a sign that something is uniquely wrong with you. The feeling of burnout — the exhaustion, the detachment, the reduced sense of accomplishment — and the feeling of not belonging are documented experiences shared by a significant proportion of students in high-pressure academic environments. They are the predictable responses of a human nervous system to conditions that exceed its current capacity to manage, and they are both recoverable and preventable with the right support. The most direct evidence-based recommendation is to tell someone the truth. Not a performed version of how you are doing, but the actual version. One honest conversation with a friend, a family member, a counsellor, or a mentor — in which you say something close to the reality of your experience — is consistently identified in the clinical literature as the single most protective act available to someone in psychological distress. If your university has counselling services, use them: the stigma around mental health help-seeking is a cultural artefact, not a rational response to the evidence, and every week of delay in seeking help is a week of unnecessary suffering. At the practical level: sleep matters more than one more hour of studying; physical movement is a genuine and effective mood regulator; and the gratitude practice — noting one specific, genuine thing from the past 24 hours that you are glad happened — is the lowest-cost, highest-evidence intervention in the entire positive psychology literature. The Rekhi Foundation's Science of Happiness Course is available at an increasing number of Indian universities precisely to provide students with these tools before the crisis arrives, and the evidence on its effects suggests that students who complete it are significantly better equipped to navigate exactly the experiences this question describes. The broader message of the happiness research is not that university should be easy. It is that you are not alone in finding it hard, and that the hardness does not have to become the defining experience of these years.
Rekhi Foundation, founded in 2016, promotes Happiness Science via university centers, collaborating globally across six countries.
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