Kashmir’s response to its suicide epidemic reveals a government more invested in managing optics than in saving lives
I. Ahmad Wani:
There is a particular kind of governance that mistakes the appearance of action for action itself. It builds things — fences, committees, helpline numbers — and then points to them as evidence of a problem solved, or at least of a problem managed. It is governance driven not by the urgency of human suffering but by the anxiety of visibility. What it fears most is not the tragedy. It is the photograph of the tragedy.
Jammu and Kashmir’s recently announced decision to cover the bridges of the Jhelum — including the storied Amira Kadal in Srinagar — with iron grilles and safety barriers, in response to a series of suicide attempts from those very structures, is a worthy and well-intentioned measure. It will, in all probability, prevent some deaths at those specific points. For that limited achievement, the authorities deserve measured acknowledgment. But to treat this as a meaningful policy response in the face of what the data reveals about the Valley’s mental health catastrophe would be the equivalent of placing a bandage on a broken spine.
A Crisis Written in Numbers
The statistics, laid out plainly, are staggering. In 2022, Jammu and Kashmir recorded the highest number of attempted suicides of any Union Territory in India: 497 cases, accounting for nearly 30 per cent of the national total of 1,769 attempted suicides. In 2023, completed suicides across the UT rose to 365, a 13 per cent increase from the previous year’s figure of 323. Unemployment was identified as the leading cause, driving 48 per cent of cases or 178 deaths, including 114 men and 73 women. Hanging was the most common method. The Valley’s share in these figures was, year after year, overwhelming — between 95 and 97 per cent of all recorded cases originating within the Kashmir Division.
The age profile is the most devastating detail of all. The majority of those who die or attempt suicide are between 15 and 30 years old: students, fresh graduates, young women pressed into corners by domestic pressure, and young men staring at a future that appears to contain no door they are permitted to open. A 2024 to 2025 pediatric audit at a Valley hospital recorded nearly 200 adolescent self-harm cases within a single study period. These are not abstractions. These are classrooms with empty chairs, families that have been quietly hollowed out, a generation leaking away in the silence between news cycles.
But perhaps no single figure captures the true scale of the Valley’s silent anguish more starkly than this: the Tele-MANAS helpline, the government’s own national mental health service reachable at 14416, received more than 1.5 lakh calls from Jammu and Kashmir in the month of March alone. One hundred and fifty thousand human beings reaching for a telephone in their darkest hour. The numbers, according to those monitoring the service, are not falling. They are climbing.
Read that figure again. One month. One hundred and fifty thousand calls.
Now consider this: most of those callers found that number not through a government billboard, not through a school orientation programme, not through a television campaign, not through a pamphlet tucked into a hospital discharge form. They found it through word of mouth, through a shared message on a mobile phone, through the desperate midnight search of someone who had already exhausted every other option. Because the Tele-MANAS number — a service that has become one of the most dialled lifelines in the Valley — is advertised with roughly the same enthusiasm the government reserves for revenue notices and road tenders. Which is to say: barely at all.
This is a scandal hiding in plain sight. A hundred and fifty thousand calls in a single month is not a statistic. It is a collective cry. It is the Valley telling the administration, in the only language it has left available, that the crisis is not at the bridge. It is everywhere. It is in the kitchen at midnight. It is in the examination hall. It is in the silence following a family argument. It is in the chest of a twenty-three-year-old who has sent out forty job applications and received forty silences in return.
And the government’s response to this cry? It has fenced the bridges. And forgotten to put up the posters.
Placed in a global context, the severity registers with even greater force. The World Health Organization estimates that approximately 703,000 people die by suicide each year worldwide, with suicide standing as the fourth leading cause of death among those aged 15 to 29 globally. India’s own National Mental Health Survey found that one in seven Indians suffers from a mental health condition, with treatment gaps exceeding 80 per cent in most states. In regions scarred by prolonged conflict, the WHO notes, the prevalence of mental health disorders can be two to three times the global average. Kashmir, which has lived through three decades of armed conflict, curfews, enforced disappearances, and relentless cycles of political uncertainty, sits at precisely this intersection of structural vulnerability.
“Suicide is rarely about a single moment or a single place,” Dr. Murad Khan, a leading authority in suicide prevention research, has observed in his work on low and middle income countries. “It is almost always the terminal point of a long journey through untreated pain. Removing access to one method delays but does not interrupt that journey unless the underlying pain is addressed.”
The Gravedigger Fallacy
The bridge barriers, taken as a standalone measure, commit what might fairly be called the Gravedigger Fallacy: the belief that if you remove the most visible instrument of a problem, you have removed the problem itself. There is a fable, apocryphal but instructive, of a town so terrified of death that its elders gathered, deliberated, and reached a solemn conclusion: arrest the gravedigger. Without a man to dig graves, there could be no graves, and without graves, perhaps no deaths. The gravedigger was prosecuted with great institutional seriousness. The townsfolk congratulated each other warmly. People, with characteristic ingratitude toward administrative logic, continued to die.
We have arrested our gravedigger. We have issued him a stern warning and instructed him to remain away from bridges. The Noorbagh bridge received its grilles and, indeed, recorded zero attempts at that precise location for over a year thereafter. Mission accomplished. Never mind that the Jhelum stretches for forty kilometres through the Valley. Never mind that the Valley’s homes contain beams, kitchens contain cylinders, and pharmacies dispense medicines that can be misused in quantities far smaller than a bridge jump requires. Never mind the hundreds of thousands of private rooms where despair may still knock politely, enter without invitation, and close the door quietly behind it. We have secured the spot. The press release has been issued.
The analogy that presents itself is uncomfortable but accurate. This is governance that communicates, in effect: carry your despair wherever you wish, but do not carry it onto a structure we have inaugurated. Die, if the weight becomes unbearable, but do so out of frame, off camera, away from the tourist photographs and the quarterly progress reports. The riverfront has been reserved for shikaras and selfies. It is the administration of embarrassment, dressed in the language of public safety.
Here lies the particular irony of that logic when placed against the Tele-MANAS data. The government possesses, in that helpline, a live and detailed window into the true dimensions of this crisis. Every one of those 1.5 lakh calls in March represents a data point: a location, a demographic profile, a stated reason for reaching out, a pattern that, if analysed with seriousness and acted upon with urgency, could form the empirical foundation of a genuine mental health policy. Instead, the same administration that sits upon this extraordinary real-time evidence of mass psychological distress has invested its visible energy in welding iron grilles to bridge railings. The data exists. The will to read it, apparently, does not.
What the Peace Dividend Has Revealed
There is a historical dimension to this crisis that demands honest reckoning.
Suicide in Kashmir is not a consequence of 2019, nor of any single administrative transition. The decade between 2010 and 2020 alone saw over 3,000 suicides recorded in the Kashmir Valley. These tragedies accumulated throughout the years of peak militancy, throughout curfews and communication shutdowns, throughout every political convulsion that made Jammu and Kashmir a subject of sustained national and international attention. They existed throughout all of it — but they were absorbed into a far more dramatic and politically convenient narrative. A young man who had lost his will to live was a smaller story than the encounter operation that took place three streets from his home. Grief was treated as a footnote. Despair was background noise.
“In high-conflict environments, civilian psychological casualties are systematically undercounted,” notes a 2019 Médecins Sans Frontières assessment of mental health in Kashmir, which found that 45 per cent of the Valley’s adult population exhibited symptoms of significant mental distress. That distress did not dissolve when the conflict quietened. In many ways, the silence amplified it.
Now, in what the government rightly characterises as a period of relative peace — fewer encounters, a reduced frequency of political violence — the background music has become the main composition. The cameras have fewer fires to pursue. The suicides, present all along, are now the story. They have not multiplied dramatically. They have simply become visible. And the authorities, caught without a script for this particular visibility, have defaulted to what institutions do best when the crisis outpaces their imagination: visible action that changes nothing at the root.
This visibility must not be squandered. The 1.5 lakh calls to Tele-MANAS in a single month are proof, for any administration still requiring proof, that the demand for mental health support in the Valley is not a media construction. It is real, it is urgent, and it is being met in significant part by a helpline that the majority of callers discovered entirely by accident — because the state has not considered it sufficiently important to advertise with consistency or conviction.
The Policy That Is Not Yet a Policy
What would genuine intervention look like? Its architecture has been described with sufficient clarity by mental health professionals and public health researchers for long enough now that ignorance can no longer serve as an excuse. It would require district-level deployment of trained counsellors and psychiatrists, not in Srinagar alone but in Kupwara, Sopore, Shopian, and Anantnag. It would require school and college mental health programmes that treat psychological distress as a medical condition deserving treatment rather than a character deficiency deserving correction. It would require destigmatisation campaigns designed through genuine community consultation rather than approved through a government printing house.
And it would require, at the absolute minimum, the following: a sustained, visible, and unapologetic public campaign ensuring that every person in the Kashmir Valley knows the number 14416. Knows it as instinctively as the ambulance number. Knows it because it appears on the walls of bus stops and government schools and primary health centres and the reverse side of ration cards. If 1.5 lakh people called in March without being told to, one must ask with some urgency how many more are sitting in undisclosed crisis, unaware that a telephone call is even an option available to them. The reluctance to advertise a mental health helpline in a territory where that helpline is receiving this volume of calls is not a bureaucratic oversight. It is a policy failure and a moral one simultaneously.
Then there is the economic dimension that no amount of counselling alone can resolve. Unemployment drove nearly half of all suicide cases in 2023. No fence addresses the despair of a postgraduate degree holder in Baramulla who has submitted application after application into an institutional silence that sends nothing back. That specific anguish requires structural economic planning: not the ritual announcement of positions that remain vacant through successive governments, but investment in the Valley’s productive capacity that is honest about both its ambitions and its timelines.
“Mental health is not separate from economic health, social health, or political health,” Dr. Shekhar Saxena, former Director of the WHO’s Department of Mental Health, has observed. “You cannot treat one without attending to the others.”
The River Keeps Flowing
The Jhelum has moved through this valley for centuries. It has witnessed the arrival and recession of empires, has carried silt and poetry and commerce, and has been made, in recent years, to carry grief as well. The grilles on its bridges may interrupt that grief at one particular point in its passage. For that constrained achievement, they merit a word of acknowledgment.
But the river is long. And the grief is longer.
One hundred and fifty thousand calls in a single month. That is Kashmir speaking. That is not a bridge problem. That is not a railing problem. That is the audible strain of an entire society carrying a weight it has borne, largely alone, for decades — and beginning, haltingly, to reach for help. The question before this administration is whether it is listening, or whether it remains occupied with the welding torch.
Kashmir’s young are not standing at bridge railings because the railings are accessible. They are standing there because they have been unable to find a reason, sufficiently solid and sufficiently believable, to step back. That reason is not fabricated in a government workshop or installed by a contractor before the next inspection visit. It is built through employment that is real, through counsellors who arrive and stay, through communities that have been given permission to speak about pain without shame, through a state that addresses its citizens as people with futures rather than as administrative problems requiring physical containment.
Until the government commits to that longer, harder, and considerably less photogenic work — until it places the Tele-MANAS number on every bus shelter and school wall in the Valley with the same urgency it brings to the installation of iron grilles — the fences will remain precisely what they are: a gesture. An acknowledgment that the crisis exists. Not, by any honest measure, a response to it.
The gravedigger has been arrested. The calls keep coming. The dying continues.
It is time — long past time — to ask why.
