On January 7, 2024, a horrific murder shattered Goa’s laid-back calm. The CEO of an AI start-up smothered her four-year-old son to death at a resort after giving him cough syrup. Hours later, she was arrested in neighbouring Karnataka, with her son’s body stuffed in a bag. The reason? A divorce case was on, and the woman did not want her son to see his father. While Suchana Seth’s case triggered considerable media frenzy, a disturbing pattern has been emerging quietly – a string of cases in which children have been killed by their own parents, often as part of a suicide pact.
Behind the headlines were stories of broken marriages, financial stress, allegations of affairs, and domestic disputes. Over the past few months, several such cases have emerged in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Haryana, where children have unknowingly become the collateral of marital conflicts. The incidents, academically known as filicide-suicide, have raised a pertinent question. Are these isolated tragedies, or do they point to a deeper crisis inside Indian families?
To decode the question, we spoke to psychiatrists, counsellors, and professors. In our article, we didn’t just want to answer why these incidents happen, but why they keep happening so frequently.
ONE-OFF INCIDENTS OR WORRISOME TREND?
Now, India does not have detailed data to answer the question conclusively, as NCRB does not separately record cases of filicide-suicide. However, its suicide data offers some context – family problems are the leading single cause of suicide in India. While this does not tell us if parent-child killings are part of a broader trend, it points to the wider environment in which such extreme cases can occur.
According to the latest NCRB data (2024), family problems account for over 34% of suicide cases – the single-largest reported cause and more than one-third of all suicides. The 2023 data showed a similar picture. Family problems accounted for 31.9% of suicides.
“The broader risk of suicide has increased – a rising denominator against which filicide-suicide risk sits,” Maitrayee Sen, a PhD scholar and teaching fellow at Ashoka University, told IndiaToday.in.
Sen underlined that while filicide-suicide is a “real phenomenon”, available case reports alone are not enough to establish a clear trend.
However, a pattern in recent months suggests that it will be a mistake to dismiss them as one-off incidents.
According to 2024 data, family problems were cited in 55,175 suicide cases (AI generated)
DIFFERENT FAMILIES, SIMILAR ENDINGS
Perhaps the most horrifying of these incidents unfolded on August 11. A 49-year-old quarry worker detonated gelatin sticks at his in-laws’ place in Karnataka, where his wife had been living with their three children following a domestic dispute. The worker suspected that his wife was having an affair.
The blast, powerful enough to damage neighbouring houses, killed the man, Shivalal Rathod, and his 15-year-old daughter. Five others were injured. Rathod knew his three children were inside the house, yet he went ahead and carried out the blast.
A day before, another disturbing case unfolded in Bengaluru. A 40-year-old cab company manager, SG Imran, checked into a five-star hotel near the airport with his two daughters, aged five and 10. Hours later, he strangled both girls, then slit his own throat. However, he was rescued in time by the hotel security. A suicide note pointed to a marriage in crisis – months of disputes, arguments and suspicion of infidelity.
Such incidents are not limited to the south. Four days before the Bengaluru incident, three deaths in a family rocked Haryana’s Fatehabad.
An Anganwadi worker poisoned her nine-year-old daughter and eight-year-old son before drowning them in a 10-foot-deep water tank at the family’s farmhouse. She then took her own life. In a video, which was recovered from her phone, she accused her husband of years of harassment and drug addiction.
He checked into a five-star hotel with his two young daughters. Hours later, both girls were dead. He walked the hotel corridors for a long time after killing them, then returned and tried to end his own life.
The note said he was “taking his daughters with him.”
With questions https://t.co/pkX6V8O8Cn— Marya Shakil (@maryashakil) August 11, 2026
WHAT EXPERTS SAY
So, what drives parents to take the life of their own children? Namrata Jain, a psychotherapist and relationship expert, underlined that in severe depression or acute distress, a parent’s cognition distorts profoundly.
“This often stems from two states – altruistic filicide (where a despairing parent mistakenly believes that killing their children saves them from a cruel world) or extended self-perception (where enmeshed parents view children as extensions of themselves rather than independent individuals, feeling their entire unit must end together), like the Burari deaths,” Jain told IndiaToday.in.
On July 1, 2018, the national capital woke up to the horrifying deaths of 10 family members, who were found hanging from the ceiling of their home in Burari. Of them, three were minors. While police initially thought it to be a murder or mass suicide, they later hinted that it could be a ritual gone wrong.
What happened inside the four walls of the Burari house may never be known, as there is no one left to explain.
Burari-like incidents also unfolded recently in Andhra Pradesh’s Chittoor and Kerala’s Ernakulam. In Andhra, a man allegedly poisoned his wife and two children (aged 6 and 8) before hanging himself. Police suspect that his wife’s prolonged illness played a role.
In Kerala, the bodies of four of a family were found floating in the Muvattupuzha river in June, with financial stress believed to be behind the mass suicide.
While hundreds of kilometres may separate the incidents, a disturbing element lies at their heart – children becoming part of the crisis, mostly unknowingly. But have you noticed a startling fact? The children in these cases are not necessarily the source of the conflict. Yet they are the most vulnerable when families face a grave crisis.
THE GAP THE SYSTEM FAILS TO ADDRESS
Sen, of Ashoka University, argued that while domestic harassment was a major trigger, the key motives were often “spousal revenge” – killing a child to devastate the partner – and avoiding a custody battle in case of a divorce. A Bengaluru hotel case mentioned above is an example of ‘spousal revenge’ killings.
“Killing the children is framed as saving them from hardship and shame, almost always followed by their own suicide. The act feels not like a choice, but like the only remaining exit,” Sen explained.
Another case that has raised alarm bells happened in Karnataka’s Tumakuru district in May.
A 40-year-old temple priest allegedly smothered his two sons (aged six and 11) before killing himself. He was distressed over his wife’s alleged affair. In fact, the couple had also undergone counselling sessions involving police and local community members – a significant detail.
Counselling had taken place. Yet, the intervention did not prevent the tragedy.
Jain, who is a psychotherapist, stressed that there remains a gap in India between mental-health awareness and actually accessing proper mental-health services.
In fact, experts emphasised, the core problem is that Indian families often treat such domestic distress as something to be contained within the home. A husband and wife are expected to “sort it out”. “But, by the time outside intervention or counselling happens, the crisis may already be acute,” Jain argued.
Sen, however, had a different viewpoint. She underlined that treating marital conflict as the cause would miss most of the risk. “Filicide-suicide is most often associated with parental psychopathology,” she said.
Studies have shown that mental health disorders are found in about 30–50% of familicide cases. Depression is the most common, seen in around 36% of cases, followed by psychosis (disconnect from reality) at about 27%.
However, according to Sen, not all offenders have a serious mental illness. This makes it difficult to gauge the warning signs.
“Many act after facing extreme stress, such as financial issues or the breakdown of a relationship. In some cases, feelings of desperation, control or possessiveness may drive the violence even when there are no obvious signs of severe mental illness,” she emphasised.
HOW TO PREVENT SUCH CASES?
This suggests that prevention cannot rest entirely on psychiatrists or suicide helplines. Help must also be available within communities, through primary-care centres.
NIMHANS, India’s premier medical institution for mental health and neuroscience, already has a community training program. The government also has its SMART Mental Health program, where ASHA workers and primary-care doctors are trained to identify and manage stress, depression, and suicide risk.
However, the picture is not as rosy as it sounds.
In India, the mental health system faces a huge gap. According to Sen, studies have revealed that around 83–85% of people with mental health disorders do not get treatment. There are only 0.75 psychiatrists per 100,000 people, as against the norm of one per 100,000 people. Moreover, mental health receives roughly 1% of the Union Health Budget.
Unless this challenge is addressed, by the time the next Chittor- or Bengaluru-like incidents happen, we may be looking at the last chapter of a much longer story.
So, are these one-off incidents or a worrisome trend?
In every case we have cited above, the person who killed the children was a parent facing an acute domestic crisis – be it financial stress or a spouse’s infidelity. Now, we don’t have any single national dataset that tracks filicide-suicide, or the act of killing one’s children before attempting to take one’s own life.
While there may not be enough evidence to call these incidents a worrisome trend, there is enough evidence to sound an alarm bell.
(With inputs from Tiasa Bhowal)
– Ends
Published By:
Abhishek De
Published On:
Aug 18, 2026 09:45 IST
