A Gujarat board school with 100 or more students must now appoint a counsellor, psychologist or social worker trained in child and adolescent mental health. The state announced the requirement on Sunday, November 1, as part of a wider set of student welfare and suicide prevention rules for Classes 9 to 12, PTI reported via ThePrint. Smaller schools can instead arrange formal referrals to outside professionals, nearby health centres and the Tele-MANAS service.
The rules sit in a new Regulation 16(A) of the Gujarat Secondary and Higher Secondary Education Regulations, 1974, with the detail in Appendix 8, according to DeshGujarat and IANS via The Hans India. Those regulations bind schools affiliated to the Gujarat Secondary and Higher Secondary Education Board (GSHSEB), so CBSE and other boards’ schools fall outside them.
Fifteen months after the Supreme Court’s Sukdeb Saha ruling
Most of the framework comes from Sukdeb Saha v State of Andhra Pradesh, decided on July 25, 2025. Sabrang India’s summary of the judgment lists the 100-student counsellor threshold, a monitoring committee under each District Collector and the display of helpline numbers. Gujarat has adopted all three.
Two parts go further than a straight copy. The court aimed its advice against sorting students by marks at coaching institutes in particular, and asked them to avoid it as far as possible. Gujarat’s version bars segregation by marks inside or outside the classroom for its affiliated schools, which puts any “toppers’ section” at risk. The court also tied institutional culpability to neglected cases of assault, harassment, ragging and bullying. As PTI and IANS describe the Gujarat text, a school can face disciplinary or legal action if it failed to act on a risk it knew about, or should have known about, and that failure contributed significantly to serious harm.
No start date or funding line in the reports so far
None of the three reports gives a compliance deadline, a fine amount or a statement on who pays for the new post. The only timings are a School Wellness Team at the start of each academic year and staff training at least twice a year. With the 2026-27 year already running, schools will need the department to say whether the team must form now or next year.
Grant-in-aid schools face the hardest staffing question. The state told the Assembly in 2024 that secondary schools had 3,260 vacant teacher posts as of March 2023, of which 2,464 were in grant-in-aid schools, Careers360 reported. A school short of a maths teacher now also has to find a mental health professional.
A CBSE circular of January 2026 asks for one counselling and wellness teacher per 500 students, Careers360 reported. On that ratio a 3,000-student school needs six. The Gujarat reports mention “at least one” and no ratio, so the same school under GSHSEB could comply with a single appointment.
What a parent or student can check at school
- Displayed contacts: child helpline numbers and wellness team contacts belong on the website, notice boards, classrooms, hostels and counselling rooms.
- Peer supporters: two students serve as “Mano-Mitra”, one from Classes 9-10 and one from Classes 11-12.
- Extra support at set points: mentoring around board exams and results, and at the moves from Class 8 to 9 and Class 10 to 11.
- Private routes: confidential access to a counsellor or mentor teacher, suggestion boxes, and a complaints process covering bullying, cyberbullying, ragging, sexual harassment and discrimination.
If a school ignores these, the committee under the District Collector reviews compliance and complaints, and schools must follow its directions.
Anyone struggling can call Tele-MANAS, the Union health ministry’s free, 24-hour helpline, on 14416 or 1800-89-14416, according to PIB.
Sources: PTI via ThePrint, IANS via The Hans India, DeshGujarat, Sabrang India, Careers360, PIB
This report was written with AI assistance from the publicly reported sources linked here; each fact was cross-checked against at least two of them.