When the guardians of 10-year-old Babli Ghosh in West Bengal’s Andal railway town sent her to school on May 14, they never thought it would be her life’s last journey. Schools, her guardians thought, were meant for learning and growing up in the company of peers and caring guidance of teachers, till it proved to be a road to the house of death for this family.

Babli, who was a student of Andal Girls High School, located about 150 km from Kolkata, in Burdwan district, died after a teacher, angered over her class performance, hurled a duster that fatally hit her on the forehead.

After she was hit by the duster, Babli started vomitting in the classroom. Shockingly, the school management did not inform her immediate guardians (she was staying with her uncle and aunt for studies in Andal, with her parents living in another south Bengal district) until after she had died around 5pm that evening. Rekha Bhakat, the teacher who hurled the duster, fled after the incident. The headmistress filed a police complaint in the face of mounting protests.

Bibasa Mondal, one of Babli’s 50 classmates of Andal Girls High School, recalled the events of that day.

“She (the teacher) found some mistakes while going through the class work she had given on Babli’s Bengali notebook. Seeing that she had failed to write correctly, Bhakat shouted and then threw the duster at her,” narrated Bibasa.

“The duster hit Babli, who was sitting in the front row, on her forehead. She collapsed and vomitted four times,” Bibasa recalled.

A teacher carried Babli on her lap to a nearby nursing home in the overcrowded Andal Bazar around 12.45 pm, but her condition deteriorated very fast and she became unconscious. At around 4.30 pm, when the child became still, she was taken to a hospital in the industrial town of Durgapur, about 15 km from Andal, where doctors declared her brought dead.

It was only then that her guardians — maternal uncle Biswajit Sarkar, who works in a shop in Andal and his wife — were informed. On Friday, hundreds of people surrounded the school demanding that the teacher be handed over to them. Headmistress Tapati Bhattacharjee called the police but the crowd refused to budge. Babli’s body was kept at Andal police station as people did not allow the police to take it to Durgapur Hospital for a post-mortem. The gherao was lifted only after the headmistress lodged a police complaint.

The shocked parents of Babli, especially her mother Kabita, were inconsolable when the scribes visited their house in Andal.

“Why we kept her here for studies instead of keeping her in our own house, we don’t know,” lamented Shibendra Ghosh, the girl’s father.

Only a month ago, Babli was promoted to the High School from the Primary School. She was waiting for the school holiday when she was supposed to accompany her parents to their house in Barasat for the vacation.

While the family of the victim grieves and the school management makes attempts at damage control, the incident only brings to fore the prevalence of corporal punishment in schools, despite all the sound and fury over the issue for years now.

West Bengal School Education Minister Partha De was at pains to explain the futility of his government’s awareness efforts.

“We give training to teachers against corporal punishment but it seems that these teachers hardly take any lesson from those training sessions,” said De.

On February 17 this year, at Gopalmath Girls’ High School, another state run school in Durgapur in the same district, a teacher snipped the hair of three class nine students- Sritikona Bhattacharjee, Rupomoni Dhibar and Sunanda Hazra- during the prayer session. Keeping long hair is considered unruly in schools but the guardians were furious to learn that a teacher actually could force them to cut their hair in school.

After protests, the lady teacher blamed for the act was arrested by Durgapur Police.

According to studies, cases of corporal punishment are on the rise across the country.

According to the National Report on Child Abuse by the Ministry of Women and Child Development (MoWCD) in 2007, two out of three school-going children in India are physically abused. The crime is rampant in every district of the country. Boys are marginally more likely to face physical abuse (73%) than girls (65%).

Corporal punishment in both government as well as private schools is deeply ingrained as a tool to discipline children and as a normal action. But most children do not report or confide about the matter to anyone and suffer silently.

The report also revealed that 69% of children nationwide face physical abuse, including corporal punishment, in one or more situations. Of children abused within the family, in majority of cases the perpetrators were parents (88.6%), followed by teachers (44.8%), employers (12.4 %), caregivers (9.5%), NGO workers (4.8%) and others.

The most common reported punishment was being slapped and kicked (63.7%), followed by being beaten with a scale or stick (31.3%), and being pushed, shaken, et cetera (5%). For many the hurt resulted in serious physical injury, swelling and/or bleeding.

UNICEF, in accordance with the Convention of Rights of the Child, states that children have the right to protection from all forms of violence, abuse and maltreatment. Corporal punishment in any setting is a violation of that right. Physical and other forms of humiliating and abusive treatment are not only a violation of the child’s right to protection from violence, but also counter-productive to learning and may adversely affect the child’s performance in school.

The negative consequences for the child include low self-esteem of the child, sadness, anger, aggression, desire for revenge, disrespect for authority and can have severe implications for a child’s development and are therefore a cause for concern. Corporal punishment also interferes with the child’s desire and ability to learn and, in fact, fear of corporal punishment in school is often a significant factor for children dropping out of school. In the most severe cases like the one at Andal, it can lead to death.

Eliminating corporal punishment in all settings is also a key strategy for reducing and preventing all forms of violence in society. Human dignity, physical integrity and equal protection under the law should be the guiding principles that inform decisions for eliminating corporal punishment in all settings.

However, the Child Rights Charter 2003 of India specifically states: “All children have the right to be protected against neglect, maltreatment, injury, trafficking, sexual and physical abuse of all kinds, corporal punishment, torture, exploitation, violence and degrading treatment.”

In 2007, a 14-year-old student of a school in Mumbai was slapped on the left ear by a teacher for talking in class. The blow punctured his eardrum resulting in moderate hearing loss.

Corporal punishments in schools is already prohibited in nearly half of the world’s countries. In the past 20 years, 18 countries, including Sweden (1979), Finland (1983), Austria (1989), Bulgaria (2000), Israel (2000), Germany (2000), Ukraine (2004), Hungary (2005), Greece (2006), Netherlands (2007), New Zealand (2007), Portugal (2007), Venezuela (2007), Spain (2007) and Costa Rica (2008), have enacted laws prohibiting corporal punishment in all settings-home, schools, alternate care and in the judicial system.

In August 2007, the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) wrote to all chief secretaries with detailed guidelines recommending there should be no gradations, while judging corporal punishment. Some of them included complaint boxes in schools where students can drop their complaints, monthly meeting of the Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs) or any other body such as the School Education Committee (SEC)/Village Education Committee (VEC) to review the complaints and take action.

Almost 12 states and Union Territories- Haryana, Delhi, Tripura, Andhra Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat, Nagaland, Pondicherry, Goa, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan- have responded and taken measures based on the guidelines.

But as the debate rages and measures are discussed, students in Indian classrooms cope with the fear of physical violence.

India Blooms News Service

Debajyoti Chakraborty and Sreya Basu