The Dean's 30-Day Mental-Health Compliance Checklist (SC 2025 + 2026)

By Dr. Chandra Sekhar Bondugula — Founder, Mynaa AI
A practical 30-day plan written for the Dean, Director, Principal or Vice-Chancellor who has been told the institution is now responsible — and is wondering where, exactly, to begin.

Why this exists

On 25 March 2025, in W.P. (Crl) No. 1004 of 2025, the Supreme Court of India issued fifteen binding guidelines on student mental health for every recognised educational institution in the country — schools, colleges, universities, IITs, IIMs, medical colleges, coaching centres, hostels. In 2026 it followed with directives on coaching-centre registration and district-level monitoring under the District Magistrate.

The intent of the Court is clear. The wording, in places, is not. Many institutions I have spoken with — good institutions, run by serious people — have read the order three times and still do not know what to do on a Monday morning.

This is that Monday-morning checklist.

It is written for the person who actually signs documents on behalf of the institution: the Dean, the Director, the Principal, the Vice-Chancellor, the Head of Department, the Registrar. It is structured as four weeks of work, each week with concrete, signable, file-able actions. By the end of thirty days, your institution will be defensibly compliant on the major guidelines and on the path to compliance on the rest.

I have written it without mentioning Mynaa for the first eighty per cent. Everything below is what I believe you should do, whether you ever use our platform or not. At the end I have added a short section on where Mynaa specifically reduces this work from weeks to clicks, for those who want to know.

Before Day 1: assemble the file

Open a single physical folder and a single shared digital folder titled SC 2025 Mental Health Compliance — [Institution Name]. Everything that follows lives in that folder. When UGC, AICTE, CBSE, NMC, NAAC or the District Magistrate asks you a question in the next twenty-four months, you will reach for this folder and answer in one email.

Inside, create these subfolders, in this order:

00 — Court order and reading notes
01 — Policy (Guideline I)
02 — Counsellor appointment (Guidelines II & III)
03 — Anti-segregation & anti-shaming (Guideline IV)
04 — Emergency referral (Guideline V)
05 — Staff training (Guidelines VI & VII)
06 — Internal Committee & reporting (Guideline VIII)
07 — Parent sensitisation (Guideline IX)
08 — Anonymised records & annual report (Guideline X)
09 — Activities & career counselling (Guidelines XI & XII)
10 — Drug-free residential campus (Guideline XIII)
11 — Physical safety (Guideline XIV)
12 — Coaching-hub protections (Guideline XV)
13 — 2026 directives (registration, DM committee, ATR)
14 — Annual reports to regulators

This is not bureaucracy. This is the survival kit of any institution that wants to demonstrate good faith to a regulator, a journalist, a grieving parent or a court.

Week 1, Days 1–7: Policy, people, paper

Day 1 — Issue an internal notification

From the office of the Dean / Principal, circulate a one-page notification to all Heads of Department, Wardens, the Registrar, the Chief Medical Officer and the Student Affairs Office. State plainly: the institution is implementing the Supreme Court’s 2025 guidelines on student mental health. The lead officer for this implementation is [name]. Cooperation is mandatory. Timeline: 30 days for first-stage compliance.

Sign it. Date it. File it under 00. This is your start-line evidence.

Day 2 — Appoint the Nodal Officer

Guideline I asks for a uniform mental-health policy, which means someone owns it. Appoint, in writing, a single Mental Health Nodal Officer. It should be a senior person — a Dean of Students, the Chief Medical Officer, a Professor with administrative authority. Not a part-time counsellor without seniority. The Nodal Officer is accountable to you and to the regulators.

The appointment letter is a one-page document. File under 02.

Day 3 — Draft the policy (do not perfect it)

The Court’s framework is UMMEED (UGC, 2023) + MANODARPAN (MoE) + the National Suicide Prevention Strategy (MoHFW, 2022). You do not need to invent anything. Take the UMMEED template, the MANODARPAN guidance and the NSPS objectives, and write a policy that says, section by section, how your institution will implement each of them.

Keep it short. A good policy is 8–12 pages. A 40-page policy is a policy nobody will read.

Sections to include, at minimum:

Statement of intent and scope
Definitions (in line with the National Mental Healthcare Act, 2017)
Roles and responsibilities (Nodal Officer, counsellors, wardens, faculty, parents)
Services available to students (and how to access them, including out-of-hours)
Referral pathways to NIMHANS-empanelled facilities and Tele-MANAS (14416)
Confidentiality and data protection (DPDP Act 2023 compliance)
Special protection for SC/ST/OBC/EWS/LGBTQ+/PwD students (Guideline VII)
Anti-ragging, anti-harassment, anti-bullying (Guideline VIII)
Crisis response & postvention protocol
Annual review mechanism

File the draft under 01.

Day 4 — Audit your existing counsellor cover

Guideline II requires that any institution with more than 100 students appoint a qualified counsellor. Guideline III requires an optimal student-to-counsellor ratio and the appointment of dedicated mentors.

Pull the numbers in one afternoon:

Total student enrolment
Number of qualified counsellors currently on the payroll, with their RCI registration numbers
Number of empanelled visiting counsellors / psychiatrists
Current student-to-counsellor ratio
Out-of-hours cover (yes / no)

If your ratio is worse than 1:1000, you are below the National Mental Health Policy benchmark. If you have no out-of-hours cover at all, you have a Guideline V problem that the Court will not forgive in the event of a campus death.

File the audit under 02.

Day 5 — Publish the emergency numbers

Guideline V mandates emergency referral protocols and the public display of helplines — Tele-MANAS (14416), iCall (9152987821), Vandrevala Foundation (1860-2662-345), KIRAN (1800-599-0019), AASRA (9820466726). This is the cheapest item on this list and the one most often skipped.

Put these numbers on:

Every hostel notice board, in English and the local language
The back of every student ID card (new printing cycle)
The institution’s website footer
The login screen of the institutional Wi-Fi (a single line is enough)
The first page of the academic handbook

Photograph each placement. File the photographs under 04. This is evidence.

Days 6–7 — The Internal Committee

Guideline VIII requires an Internal Committee for ragging, harassment and bullying. Most institutions already have an Anti-Ragging Committee under the UGC 2009 regulations and an Internal Complaints Committee under the POSH Act 2013. The Court is asking you to consolidate the mental-health dimension of these, not to create a fourth committee.

Issue a single Office Order constituting an Internal Mental Health & Welfare Committee with:

The Dean or Vice-Principal (Chair)
The Mental Health Nodal Officer
One qualified counsellor or psychiatrist
One faculty member trained in QPR or equivalent
One senior student representative
One external member (a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist from outside the institution)

Specify quorum, term, meeting frequency (minimum quarterly) and the grievance pathway. File under 06.

Week 2, Days 8–14: People-readiness

Day 8 — Schedule the biannual staff training

Guideline VI requires mandatory staff training twice a year in psychological first-aid. Guideline VII requires sensitivity training for working with SC/ST/OBC/EWS/LGBTQ+/PwD students. The standard the Court is pointing at is, in practice, the Question, Persuade, Refer (QPR) gatekeeper protocol and NIMHANS’s sensitisation modules.

Block two dates on the academic calendar — one in each semester. Mandate attendance for: all hostel wardens, all faculty advisors, all administrative staff in student-facing roles, all security staff, all medical-room staff. Non-compliance should block annual increments. The Court was specific that this cannot be optional.

Issue the calendar entry, the attendance template and the assessment template now. File under 05.

Days 9–10 — The crisis and postvention protocol

Write a two-page document that any warden, faculty member or security guard can act on in an emergency at 2 a.m. on a Sunday. Cover:

What to do in the first ten minutes if a student is in active suicidal crisis (do not leave alone, call the empanelled psychiatrist, call the helpline, inform parents only after stabilisation)
Which hospital you take a student to (named, with the consultant’s mobile number)
Who calls the parents, in what tone, with what information
What to do in the first 72 hours after a death by suicide on campus — the postvention checklist (NIMHANS guidance applies here)
What you do not do (no detailed press statement, no message in student groups, no public memorial that romanticises the death)

Have it reviewed by an external psychiatrist before signing. File under 04.

Days 11–12 — Parent sensitisation

Guideline IX asks for parental sensitisation programmes. You do not need a four-hour Zoom call. Build a five-module micro-learning track that parents complete during admissions and once a year thereafter. Five modules, fifteen minutes each:

Understanding anxiety in your child
Handling exam-period stress as a parent
Communication that does not shut your child down
Digital wellbeing
Building resilience without breaking the child

Track completion. Issue a one-page certificate. Make it a condition of the admission process for the next batch. File the curriculum under 07.

Days 13–14 — The student-facing channels

Decide and publish: how does a student, today, reach a counsellor without crossing the table of a department head who knows her face?

A dedicated student-mental-health email, monitored by the Nodal Officer with a 24-hour SLA
A QR-code on every hostel notice board that opens an anonymous form
An out-of-hours number (the empanelled psychiatrist or a 24/7 platform — this is where many institutions struggle on their own)
The Tele-MANAS / iCall / Vandrevala numbers, as above

The Court is uninterested in an excellent counsellor who is unreachable. Reachability is the test. File the channels under 04.

Week 3, Days 15–21: Curriculum, campus, culture

Day 15 — Audit batch segregation and public shaming

Guideline IV explicitly bans the segregation of students by performance and the public display of ranks — especially in coaching centres but applicable wherever it occurs. Walk your campus this week. Look for:

Hostel rooms or sections assigned by performance
Public notice boards or WhatsApp groups that display test ranks with names
“Top performers” lists posted in common areas
Mock-test results read aloud in class with names

Issue a circular ending all four practices, with a thirty-day deadline. File the circular under 03.

Days 16–17 — Activities and career counselling

Guidelines XI and XII ask for genuine extracurricular, personality-development and career-counselling provision — not as cosmetic offerings, but as part of the protective factors of student mental health.

Document what already exists. Identify gaps. Build a calendar of activities for the year — sports, arts, debating, community service, hobby groups. For career counselling, build or buy a pathway library that goes beyond engineering and medicine: design, public policy, law, civil services, agriculture, the creative industries. File the calendar and the pathway library under 09.

Days 18–19 — The hostel and physical-safety audit

Guideline XIV is uncomfortable but specific. The Court has asked institutions to take physical safety seriously, including the use of tamper-proof ceiling fans in hostels and restricted access to rooftops. Walk every hostel block. List the rooms by floor. Flag:

Ceiling fans without anti-suicide rods (commercial product, available)
Rooftops accessible without supervision
Open stairwells above the second floor
Window grilles in bathrooms

Issue a remediation order with a sixty-day deadline. Photograph each item before and after. File under 11. This is the hardest section to discuss and the one a grieving family will ask about first.

Day 20 — Drug-free campus

Guideline XIII asks for a drug-free, harassment-free residential campus. Coordinate with your local police narcotics cell. Document the engagement. File under 10.

Day 21 — If you are in a coaching hub

If your institution operates in Kota, Sikar, Chennai, Hyderabad, Delhi, Mumbai or any other identified coaching hub, Guideline XV and the 2026 coaching-centre directives apply directly. Register with the State authority. Adopt the model student-protection norms. Limit batch sizes. Ban public ranking. Build mandatory breaks into the timetable. File under 12 and 13.

Week 4, Days 22–30: Records, reports, review

Days 22–23 — Anonymised records

Guideline X requires the institution to maintain anonymised records of mental-health cases and to submit an annual report to UGC, AICTE, CBSE or the relevant regulator. Decide how you will keep these records:

Counsellor session counts, not names
Risk-screening aggregates (PHQ-9, GAD-7 averages by year and gender, never by individual)
Crisis incidents (count, severity, response time, outcome)
Training attendance percentages
Helpline call volumes

Conform to the DPDP Act 2023 on data minimisation, retention and the appointment of a Data Protection Officer. File the data dictionary under 08.

Days 24–25 — Annual report template

Write the annual report template now, while you are calm. Future-you, in March, with a 31 March deadline to UGC, will thank present-you. The template should produce a 12–15 page document that any reviewer can read in one sitting and that maps section-by-section to the SC 2025 guidelines. File under 08.

Day 26 — The 2026 directives

The 2026 directives require coaching centres to be registered, district-level monitoring committees to function under the District Magistrate, and educational institutions in higher education to report student incidents (suicide, unnatural deaths) and to ensure 24/7 medical facility access within one kilometre of campus.

Confirm: are you within one kilometre of a hospital with a psychiatry department or, at minimum, a casualty? If not, what is your MoU arrangement? Sign the MoU now, not after an incident. File under 13.

Day 27 — If you are a medical college

The NMC has mandated a monthly Action Taken Report (ATR) under Public Notice CDN-11011/1/2026. Ten sections. Due on the seventh of each following month. Make it a recurring entry on the Registrar’s calendar. File the format under 14.

Day 28 — The Internal Committee’s first quarterly meeting

Convene it. Minute it. Note attendance. Note the items reviewed. Sign and circulate the minutes. File under 06. If this committee meets only once a year, it is a paper committee, and the Court will see through it.

Day 29 — The Vice-Chancellor / Director’s briefing

Prepare a one-hour briefing. Walk the top of the institution through the folder. Get it formally noted in the next Governing Council or Academic Council meeting. The single sentence in the minutes — “The Council noted the institution’s compliance status with the Supreme Court’s 2025 mental-health guidelines as of [date].” — is worth more than any other document in the folder.

Day 30 — The honest self-assessment

On the thirtieth day, sit alone for one hour with the folder. Score yourself, guideline by guideline, on three columns: policy in place, practice in place, evidence in folder. The honest answer for most institutions in month one will be: policy yes, practice partial, evidence partial. That is normal and acceptable. The point is that you now know exactly where the gaps are, and you have a defensible plan to close each one in the next ninety days.

What the Court is really asking for

I have practised medicine and taught medicine in India for over thirty years. I have read the 2025 order carefully, many times. Underneath the legal language, the Court is asking three simple things:

Do you know who your distressed students are? — the screening, the counsellor cover, the channels.
When one of them is in danger at 3 a.m., does the institution respond as if it cares? — the emergency protocol, the trained staff, the reachable helpline.
When something goes wrong, does the institution learn? — the records, the reports, the postvention, the review.

Every guideline in the 2025 order falls into one of those three buckets. Build for those three, and the legal compliance follows.

Where Mynaa fits in

Everything above is what I would do whether Mynaa existed or not. I have run institutions. I have signed these files. I know the work.

Mynaa exists because, having watched many good institutions struggle through this work by hand — building spreadsheets, chasing wardens, retyping the ATR every month — I do not think it is the best use of an institution’s time. So we have built, in software:

The 24/7 multilingual counsellor (Guideline V, out-of-hours)
The standardised screening (PHQ-9, GAD-7, DASS-21, C-SSRS) with anonymised aggregates (Guideline X)
The QPR-style staff training module with attendance tracking (Guidelines VI & VII)
The Internal Committee workflow with SLA timers (Guideline VIII)
The student-to-counsellor ratio monitor (Guideline III)
The parent micro-learning track (Guideline IX)
The career-pathway library (Guideline XII)
The annual report and NMC monthly ATR, auto-generated from the data the platform is already collecting (Guideline X + 2026 NMC notice)
The crisis-escalation and postvention workflow with audit trail

The point is not that Mynaa replaces the work of a thoughtful Dean. It does not. The point is that a thoughtful Dean should not have to do this work by hand, and the hours saved should be returned to the students.

A small ask

If you are a Dean, a Director, a Principal or a Vice-Chancellor and you would like the editable Word version of this thirty-day checklist — including the policy template, the Internal Committee Office Order, the crisis protocol and the annual report template — write to me at founder@mynaa.ai. I will send it without a sales pitch and without an account being created. Use it freely.

The Court has placed a heavy responsibility on your shoulders. I would like to make it lighter.

— Dr. Chandra Sekhar Bondugula
Founder, Mynaa AI