By Dr. Chandra Sekhar Bondugula — Founder, Mynaa AI
Senior physician executive, medical educator
Two I could not save
During MBBS, I lost two people I loved — a close friend, and a cousin. Both to suicide.
My friend was the brightest among us. He was the kind of person who would stay up explaining a concept to you the night before an exam, even though he had his own paper to prepare for. To anyone watching from the outside, he was doing fine. He was not.
We were medical students. We had read the chapters on depression. We knew the diagnostic criteria. We could list the medications. And still, none of us — not his friends, not the people who loved him — could read the signs in time. By the time anyone understood how much he was carrying, he was already gone.
My cousin’s loss came differently. There was no warning anyone in the family read, no chapter we had studied. One morning, they were simply not there. The family was left holding the question every Indian household with a loss like this knows too well: what did we miss?
Two people. Two losses I have carried into every decision I have made since. Neither of them got the conversation, the phone call, the hand on the shoulder, at the moment that might have changed everything.
That loss has never left me. I think about both of them often, even now, decades later. I think about what one honest conversation at the right moment might have done. I think about a single helpline, answered in their own language, at three in the morning.
Mynaa exists because of them. And because of every student, every resident, every young doctor I have watched struggle in the years since.
What I have seen as a teacher
In the years after my MBBS, I trained as a physician and then spent a large part of my career as a medical educator. I have taught undergraduates. I have mentored residents. I have sat across the table from young people who were brilliant on paper and breaking quietly on the inside.
I have seen the MBBS student who has not slept for four nights before her professional exams. I have seen the IIT aspirant in Kota who has been told by his family that anything less than a top rank is a failure of the family itself. I have seen the post-graduate resident who has worked thirty-six hours straight and is now expected to make a clinical decision that will change someone's life. I have seen the young intern who lost her first patient and could not stop crying in the duty room because there was nowhere else to go and no one to ask if she was okay.
These are not rare cases. These are Tuesdays in Indian medical and engineering education.
The system did not build us a place to put this pain. So we taught ourselves to carry it. And many of us, like my friend, could not.
The numbers now confirm what those of us inside the system have always known. The National Crime Records Bureau recorded over 13,000 student suicides in 2022 alone. The Supreme Court of India, in its 2025 and 2026 directives, has finally said clearly what we have long needed someone to say: this is a national emergency, and every educational institution must take responsibility.
The intent is right. The protocols are right. But intent and protocols on a piece of paper do not pick up the phone at three in the morning. Someone has to actually do the work.
That is why I built Mynaa.
Why an app, and why now
I am a doctor. I trust human relationships. For most of my life I would have told you that an app cannot replace a counsellor, and I still believe that. Mynaa is not trying to replace anyone.
But here is the truth of Indian education today. We have roughly one psychiatrist for every 1.3 lakh people. A typical college has one counsellor for thousands of students. A village school often has none. The student in distress at 2 a.m. in a hostel in Kota, or in Imphal, or in a residency in a district hospital, does not have a counsellor to call. She has a phone.
If she has a phone, she should have someone on the other end of it. In her language. Trained on the protocols that NIMHANS — India's apex mental health institute — has spent decades developing. Available every minute of every day. Free of judgement. Smart enough to know when the situation is beyond what any app should handle, and when it is time to wake up a real human being.
That is what Mynaa is. A doctor in the pocket of every Indian student. Not a replacement for the counsellor or the psychiatrist or the warden or the parent — but the layer underneath all of them, the one that catches you when no one else is in the room.
We built it on the protocols I trust as a clinician — the Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale, Question-Persuade-Refer gatekeeper training, structured Safety Planning, postvention support. We built it in 23 Indian languages because mental health support that is not in your mother tongue is not really support. We built compliance reporting into it — the NMC monthly reports, the Supreme Court 2026 institutional requirements — because I have watched good colleges drown in paperwork while students suffered, and I refuse to let that be the reason another life is lost.
What I am asking of you
If you are a Dean, a Director, a Principal, a Head of Department reading this — I am asking you to take the responsibility the Supreme Court has placed on your shoulders, and to take it as a doctor would: seriously, technically, and with humility. Your students are not statistics. They are someone's children. Build the system that would have saved my friend.
If you are a counsellor or a teacher reading this — I am asking you to let us help you. You cannot be on call for thousands of students every minute of every day. You should not have to be. Let the AI carry the weight of the 2 a.m. conversations and the language barriers and the paperwork, so that you can do the deeply human work that only you can do.
If you are a parent reading this — I am asking you to listen to your child differently this week. Ask one more question than you usually do. And know that there is now a tool, in your language, that they can turn to even when they cannot bring themselves to turn to you.
If you are a student reading this — I am asking you to remember that you are not alone, even on the nights when it feels most like you are. You can open Mynaa in your language, at any hour, and someone will be there. And if it ever becomes too much for an app to hold, Mynaa will gently and immediately put you in touch with a human being who can.
In closing
I built Mynaa because a friend I loved did not get the help he deserved.
I cannot bring him back. But if Mynaa keeps even one student alive who would otherwise have been lost — one student, in one hostel, on one bad night, in one of India's twenty-three languages — then everything we have built will have been worth it.
That is why we are here.
If you would also like to read about why we named it Mynaa — what an Indian bird taught me about compassionate, multilingual, alarm-raising, community-minded care — that story is here:
What is Mynaa — And Why We Named It After a Bird →
— Dr. Chandra Sekhar Bondugula
Founder, Mynaa AI