Union Budget 2026 and Mental Health
The union budgetary allocation for health in 2026-27 has increased to 10% compared to the previous year, with the health sector receiving ₹1.05 lakh crore. Nevertheless, it is too low, as the budget allocates only 0.26% of GDP to health and a mere 1.05% of the health budget to mental health. While the recent budget has been hailed for its increased allocation to mental health, it has fallen short of allocating funds for preventive mental health through intersectoral convergence and decentralised, community-based interventions. By allocating 95% of the mental health budget for the establishment of a new NIMHANS in North India and strengthening center-run tertiary mental health institutes in Tezpur and Ranchi, it signals continued hegemony of curative, late-stage, hospital-based mental health care over preventive and promotive mental health care via early-stage, participatory interventions away from urban-centric facilities.
Programme Without Policy
Public spending on health in India is one of the lowest in the world and mental health has remained the least priority in India’s public health sector. Discrimination against the mental health sector in policy making is explicit for India has had a national mental health programme since 1982 without a national mental health policy in place. India’s first national mental health policy was launched in 2014 (32 years after the national mental health programme was launched), making a rare, paradoxical case of programmes without a policy.
“Health for all has to be health with all”
The Declaration of Astana on Primary Health Care 2018 presses the point that “Health for all has to be with all”. The scaling up of mental health services seldom achieves mental health for all, as needs and aspirations of the marginalised sections are eclipsed. It is vital to involve local communities in the design, delivery and control of mental health services.
The Supreme Court constituted the National Task Force on Mental Health following the deaths by suicide of IIT Delhi students in 2025. It noted the staggering statistic of student deaths by suicide, outnumbering farmers’ deaths by suicide. Mental health vulnerabilities are produced, reproduced, and reinforced by biased institutional policies that even violate statutory and constitutional safeguards, e.g. courts have noted even elite institutions such as IITs flouting procedures established by law to cover up death by suicide, unnatural death, or similar incidents that deflate institutional prestige.
Scaling up the number of psychologists as the primary line of intervention to tackle suicides on campuses has not yielded the expected results, as students’ voices and grave structural issues such as discrimination are brushed under the carpet.
It provides a compelling picture of socio-political determinants of mental health being perpetually ignored by psychologists who fail to speak up against institutional violence. Infrastructures rooted in justice, care and constitutional morality are preventive mental health interventions that are often overlooked. In 2025, Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), which are premier educational institutes, refused to participate in the survey conducted as part of the Supreme Court-mandated National Task Force on student deaths by suicide and mental health. The Supreme Court had to intervene with a strict warning to ensure their participation (Choudhary, 2025). In 2026, the Supreme Court directed all higher educational institutes to report deaths by suicide to the nearest police station immediately evidencing violation of procedures established by law, even in matters of loss of lives. The apex court warned that the institutes cannot shirk their fundamental responsibility to make campuses inclusive and safe for everyone (ET Education, 2026).
There are many other examples that demonstrate psychologists’ connivance with the institution to protect institutional prestige. A PhD student was ‘summoned’ by the psychologist on campus without the student ever approaching her because the student had filed an official complaint with the higher authorities against the PhD supervisor, accompanied by proof of harassment. The psychologist told the student that it is because of the student’s lack of adjustment and weakness that he is not able to handle the pressure at the elite institution. His problems were attributed to his introverted personality and his lack of an easygoing, happy-go-lucky attitude, leading to the complaint against the supervisor. He was asked to make many friends and to withdraw the complaint against the professor.
In this case, the psychologist acted as an agent of the institution by summoning the student and labelling him as mentally unfit so that the institution could evade accountability.
Mental health as a social justice issue
United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), which India ratified in 2007, recognises mental health problems not merely as a biomedical issue within the individual but as psychosocial disability co-constructed by one’s (marginalised) identity, social exclusion, state dispossession, legal and social barriers, and stigma, to name a few. The Economic Survey presented along with the Union budget in 2026 acknowledges mental health as a public health crisis linked to employment insecurity, fragile food systems, and declining community support systems. Therefore, tackling mental health crises in India requires developmental and community-based approaches. There are a few excellent examples of this in practice.
The Seher Urban Community Mental Health and Inclusion Programme conceived by late Dr Bhargavi Davar, a pioneer in critical mental health studies, is a zero-coercion programme conducted at low-income areas of Pune that emphasises peer support, therapeutic support groups, and community empowerment through livelihood support, art-based therapy to achieve holistic well-being. Another interesting initiative started by a doctor couple in Tamil Nadu known as the Tribal Health Initiative tackles agrarian distress and financial anxiety through the Sittilingi Organic Farmers Association (SOFA) that helps farmers from falling into debt traps. Through The Porgai Collective the traditional Lambadi embroidery was revived, boosting local women’s self-esteem and decision making power as independent income generators.
To address the upstream structural and sociopolitical causes, such as climate change-induced heat and displacement, agrarian distress, poverty, inequalities and an increasing neoliberal order characterized by a lack of social safety nets, which are “causes of the causes”, mental health needs to be reframed as a social justice issue.
Recognition of mental health as a fundamental right flowing from Article 21 of the Constitution in a case following a student’s death suicide by the Supreme Court in 2025 is a pivotal step in this regard.
Compassion and community care as interventions
An editorial in the British Journal of Psychiatry exhorts adopting interventions that prioritise healing relationships with people, help people find meaning in their lives, and use social, humanistic interventions. Such an approach can help resource-starved tertiary institutions like NIMHANS handle severe cases that require intensive psychiatric care.
My research has documented that even community mental health programmes, an essential presence in national policy documents, including Mental Health Care Act 2017, operate in isolation from local communities and their everyday realities, with a narrow focus on diagnosis, prescription of psychiatric medicines, and overreliance on individual psychotherapies. While mental health has gained enough momentum in the union budget by strengthening central institutes, it is high time that the focus shifted to decentralisation and deprofessionalisation of mental health care so that well-established links between socio-economic determinants such as discrimination, poverty, unemployment, and rates of death by suicide are addressed at the local level.
Reference
Choudhary, A. A. Supreme Court warns IITs, IIMs: Join suicide survey or face adverse order. (2025, October 14). The Times of India. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/124540439.cms. For more details, visit The Times of India.
ETEducation. (2026, January 16). Report suicide, unnatural death of students to police fast: SC to higher education institutions. The Economic Times. https://education.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/higher-education/report-suicide-unnatural-death-of-students-to-police-fast-sc-to-higher-education-institutions/126555683
Sudarshan R. Kottai
Sudarshan R Kottai serves as an Assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad and is a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for Equity Studies, New Delhi. Trained as a clinical psychologist, his research is broadly focused on 'modernsing ' mental health systems in the Global South and their relationship with the wider social world. He grapples with questions of philosophical interest in mental health care like why mainstream mental health academia/research/ practice primarily engages in “mirroring” the world rather than in “world-making”.