The deaths of three adolescent girls in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, earlier in February 2026 have forced a reckoning with what mental health professionals are increasingly calling India’s most neglected public health emergency: the crisis of child and adolescent mental health. The intense media attention following the Ghaziabad tragedy reflects not isolated grief but a collective confrontation with a systemic failure — the failure to recognise, resource, and respond to the mental health needs of India’s 350 million children and adolescents before crises escalate to tragedies.
This issue received formal governmental acknowledgement in India’s Economic Survey 2025–26, released in January 2026, which highlighted rising mental health challenges among young people and proposed a range of preventive strategies. The convergence of clinical evidence, policy attention, and public tragedy makes this one of the most urgent social policy issues of the current moment, with direct implications for education policy, digital regulation, healthcare governance, and the allocation of public resources.
💡 Get AI-powered exam prep on your phone!
Table of Contents
Scale and Epidemiology of the Crisis
Five Important Key Points
- National Mental Health Survey findings and subsequent studies suggest that 7–10 percent of Indian adolescents have diagnosable mental health conditions, while 5–7 percent of school-aged children have ADHD.
- India has fewer than 10,000 psychiatrists for a population exceeding 1.4 billion people, with only a small fraction specialising in child and adolescent mental health.
- The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically accelerated screen dependence among children and adolescents, embedding digital devices as tools for education, recreation, and social interaction in ways that have persisted beyond the pandemic.
- The WHO issued guidelines as early as 2019 cautioning against excessive screen exposure among children and adolescents, noting adverse effects on sleep, attention, emotional regulation, and overall wellbeing.
- India’s Economic Survey 2025–26 explicitly acknowledged rising mental health challenges among young people, noting that several states are considering regulatory steps to limit adolescent social media use, drawing on precedents from Australia, France, and South Korea.
The epidemiological data on child mental health in India presents a deeply concerning picture. With 7–10 percent of adolescents having diagnosable conditions, this translates to conservatively 25–30 million young people in need of specialised mental health support, a figure that dwarfs India’s mental health service capacity. The shortage of child and adolescent psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, psychiatric social workers, and school counsellors means that the vast majority of these young people receive no professional support at all.
The World Health Organization estimates that 50 percent of all mental health conditions begin before age 14 and 75 percent before age 24. Early intervention is therefore not merely clinically preferable but is a matter of fundamental public health economics — untreated childhood mental health conditions impose vastly greater costs, both human and economic, than the costs of early identification and treatment.
The Digital Dimension: Social Media, Screen Time, and Mental Health
The relationship between digital technology use and adolescent mental health is one of the most actively researched questions in contemporary public health. India’s rapid digital expansion — with over 800 million internet users, driven partly by the near-universal penetration of affordable smartphones and low-cost data — has created conditions that are particularly concerning for young people. By 2022, India had over 467 million social media users, a substantial proportion of whom are under 18.
Excessive screen use does not cause neurodevelopmental conditions such as ADHD or autism spectrum disorders, but it can significantly exacerbate symptoms, delay diagnosis, and displace the human interaction essential for healthy brain development during periods of heightened neuroplasticity. During middle childhood and early adolescence — roughly ages 8–14 — the brain is undergoing rapid structural development in areas governing emotional regulation, impulse control, and social cognition. These are precisely the developmental processes that are most vulnerable to the displacement of in-person social interaction by screen-mediated interaction.
Internet addiction disorder — characterised by loss of control over digital use, irritability when unable to access devices, sleep disruption, and social withdrawal — has been recognised as a clinical entity in ICD-11 (the WHO’s International Classification of Diseases) as Gaming Disorder, and broader patterns of problematic internet use are increasingly prevalent in clinical practice in India.
Regulatory Responses: The Global Context and India’s Positioning
Several countries have moved to regulate adolescent social media use at the legislative level. Australia enacted legislation in 2024 prohibiting children under 16 from creating accounts on social media platforms, with platforms bearing the burden of age verification. France has implemented restrictions on social media use for minors under 15. South Korea has age-related restrictions on online gaming. These regulatory interventions remain contested — critics argue that prohibition drives use underground and increases the importance of digital literacy education — but they reflect a growing global consensus that the current digital environment for adolescents requires active governance rather than passive market reliance.
India’s Economic Survey 2025–26 endorsed the exploration of similar regulatory approaches, while acknowledging that implementation must be “thoughtful, alongside education and support rather than punitive controls.” This framing is important — effective regulation of adolescent digital use requires not just age restrictions or screen time limits but a comprehensive ecosystem of digital literacy, parental guidance frameworks, platform design accountability, and mental health awareness.
The Personal Data Protection and Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act 2023 includes provisions restricting data processing related to children (defined as under 18), requiring verifiable parental consent. While these provisions create some safeguards, they do not address the fundamental design features of social media platforms — including algorithmic recommendation systems, infinite scroll, notification-driven engagement, and social comparison mechanisms — that researchers have identified as driving excessive use and negative mental health outcomes among adolescents.
The Role of Schools, Families, and Healthcare Systems
Schools occupy a uniquely important position in India’s response to the child mental health crisis, both because they are the primary institution through which children can be reached at scale and because they are currently a significant weak link in the system. The vast majority of India’s approximately 1.5 million schools have no trained counsellor. Where school counsellors exist, they are typically undertrained for clinical mental health support and overwhelmed by their caseloads. Academic performance continues to dominate school culture, often at the explicit expense of emotional wellbeing.
The Right to Education Act 2009 does not include any provisions mandating school mental health services or psychosocial support. The National Education Policy 2020, while acknowledging the importance of holistic development, does not provide detailed frameworks for school mental health infrastructure. Bridging this policy gap requires both regulatory requirements and dedicated funding — neither of which is currently in place at a systemic level.
Families are the first and most important protective factor in child mental health outcomes. Trauma-informed parenting — which recognises how stress, loss, and adversity shape children’s behaviour and emotional development — has strong evidence for improving outcomes, particularly for children exposed to adverse childhood experiences. However, parental awareness of child mental health in India remains low, stigma around mental health help-seeking is high, and access to parenting support programmes is extremely limited outside urban centres.
Paediatricians represent the most accessible point of professional contact for families with young children. Routine developmental and mental health screening at well-child visits — asking about sleep, mood, social engagement, screen use, and peer relationships in addition to physical growth — would enable earlier identification of emerging mental health concerns. However, the average consultation time in India’s overwhelmed public healthcare system makes this an aspiration rather than a current reality without significant investment in training and capacity.
Policy Framework: Existing Programmes and Gaps
India’s National Mental Health Programme (NMHP), launched in 1982 and revised multiple times, focuses primarily on adult mental health and tertiary care. The District Mental Health Programme (DMHP), which is the NMHP’s delivery mechanism at the district level, has very limited capacity for child and adolescent mental health services. The tele-mental health initiative NIMHANS-driven Tele-MANAS, launched in 2022, provides telephone-based counselling but has not specifically addressed the child and adolescent segment with tailored services.
Ayushman Bharat Health and Wellness Centres, which are the primary health infrastructure upgrade initiative under Ayushman Bharat, could theoretically integrate mental health screening and counselling, but implementation has been slow and the mental health module has not been systematically deployed at scale.
The Economic Survey’s acknowledgement of the crisis and its recommendation of school-based screening, teacher training, and community-based counselling — particularly for low- and middle-income families — provides a policy direction, but converting this into budgeted, time-bound programmatic action requires political will and institutional capacity that are currently lacking.
Way Forward
A comprehensive national response to the child and adolescent mental health crisis requires a multi-pronged strategy that operates simultaneously across several dimensions. First, earmarked funding for child mental health within the National Mental Health Programme, with a dedicated National Child and Adolescent Mental Health Mission, needs to be established. Second, the National Education Policy’s commitments to holistic development must be operationalised through mandatory mental health screening in schools, compulsory training for school counsellors, and integration of socio-emotional learning into the school curriculum. Third, the DPDP Act’s child protection provisions must be strengthened and extended to address the design features of social media platforms that drive harmful use patterns. Fourth, a national public awareness campaign to reduce mental health stigma and increase parental mental health literacy is essential. Fifth, community-based mental health support — including peer support groups, community counsellors, and tele-mental health services specifically designed for adolescents — must be scaled up with public financing.
Relevance for UPSC and SSC Examinations
This topic is directly relevant to UPSC GS Paper 2 (Health, Education, Government Schemes for Vulnerable Populations), GS Paper 3 (Science and Technology — neuroscience, digital technology), and GS Paper 4 (Ethics — duty of care for vulnerable populations). The Mains Essay Paper frequently features topics on youth, education, mental health, and India’s social development challenges.
For SSC examinations, questions on government health programmes, child welfare schemes, the Right to Education Act, and India’s public health challenges are important General Awareness topics. The intersection of digital technology and health outcomes is an increasingly examined area reflecting current policy salience.