The mental health of students is a development imperative—and we have what's needed to secure it

That is the gap this piece addresses. Two observations about the current generation are worth taking seriously.

First, Gen Z—and the Gen Alpha cohort entering schools now—comprises youth who are text-first and digitally native. They communicate through messaging platforms, not phone calls. A child in distress is far more likely to reach for a chat interface than to dial a helpline where a stranger will hear their voice. Anonymity is often a precondition for honesty in such matters.

Second, trust among adolescents today is harder-won than it was for previous generations. Constant exposure to judgement—algorithmic and social—has made them more guarded. Any intervention that does not meet them where their trust already exists will find its reach limited.

Both observations point in the same direction: to the teacher.

India has roughly 10 million teachers supporting over 248 million students. Every day, they navigate far more than their school curriculum—a child’s visible distress, signs of trouble at home, the emotional texture of a classroom that no lesson plan accounts for.

Teachers are already involved in children’s lives in ways that extend well beyond instruction. They clearly need to remain involved; the question is how to equip them for what they are already doing. A trained teacher is not a substitute for a professional counsellor, but is better than an untrained one. And unlike counsellors, teachers already exist at the scale of the problem.

The proposal is to build on the infrastructure India has already built rather than create new institutions. Diksha, the national digital platform for teacher training, can be extended to include structured modules on recognizing distress, responding appropriately and escalating problems to another level when needed.

This is not to convert teachers into therapists. It is to give them a little more support than they currently have and formally recognize—through a portable, DigiLocker-linked credential—the pastoral work they already perform.

Teachers would be identified to students as trained and badged; students would self-select whom to approach, revealing their trust by their choice. Conversations could occur through an anonymized channel, with the child’s real identity encrypted by a ministry of education-run service and visible only if a formal escalation is triggered. That escalation layer matters.

When teacher encounter a disclosure or sign of harm beyond their training, an SOS mechanism would notify trained reviewers, who would then assess the situation independently and within minutes. A child’s identity would be revealed only to those who must act—a school safeguarding officer, a parent, or emergency services—and every such decryption would be permanently logged. Clinical services will remain the third layer, accessible for cases requiring professional care.

The design philosophy is to get more children into a first conversation; the layers above would exist only when needed.

As for privacy, data discipline could be built in from the start. Interaction records would be cleared on a rolling two-year cycle, preventing an inadvertent longitudinal mental health profile from accumulating on a child.

Such a support system would ensure that no new individuals enter a child’s life. No new institution would need to be created. The system can be built entirely on what India has already assembled: Diksha, DigiLocker, existing national helplines and the teachers present in every school in the country. Where teachers are absent, community organizations could eventually extend the model —but the foundation, once established, would be robust enough to build on.

There is a broader principle at work here. In domain after domain—from digital payments to identity, health records and more—India has demonstrated that digital public infrastructure can solve at scale problems that market solutions and legacy bureaucracy cannot.

The mental health and well-being of children are not a softer imperative than financial inclusion; they are at least as consequential. Equipping India’s students with the emotional scaffolding they need to reach their potential cannot be considered peripheral to the country’s development ambitions. Rather, it is constitutive of these, and we need a robust system in place for them to be met.

These are the authors’ personal views.

The author are, respectively, chief economic advisor. Government of India; co-founder and CEO, Centre for Digital Public Infrastructure (CDPI); and chief of staff, CDPI.