New Delhi, India – Around noon on Thursday, Krishna Prasad received a telephone call from a friend informing him that his six-year-old son, Pranay Teja, had collapsed in school and had been taken to a public hospital. By the time Prasad, who cooks in homes for a living, reached King George Hospital in Visakhapatnam, a coastal city in southern India’s Andhra Pradesh state, Teja was already dead. Teja had been slapped by his kindergarten school teacher for allegedly failing to complete his homework.
Grainy security camera footage from the classroom shows him standing in a queue in a distressed state, appearing to plead with the teacher. She pulls him closer and slaps him. Within seconds, he collapses onto her.
Other teachers rushed to attempt cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on the child before taking him to the hospital, where he was declared dead on arrival. Teja’s family says the private school had a pattern of physically punishing children. The state’s School Education Department called the death “extremely unfortunate and painful” and has formed a three-member committee to examine what happened.
Teja’s death, still under investigation, has brought to the fore a question India has never fully answered: why, more than a decade after corporal punishment was outlawed in classrooms, does hitting children remain so routine that a boy can be beaten for not finishing his homework? India banned corporal punishment in schools after introducing the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act in 2009, which came into force the next year. The law explicitly prohibits “physical punishment” and “mental harassment” of children.
India’s Juvenile Justice Act, 2015, also criminalises cruelty to a child by those in charge of them, including teachers, and courts have repeatedly held that corporal punishment is incompatible with a child’s right to dignity. But there are gaps between the law and the classrooms, especially in schools serving poor, rural and marginalised communities, where researchers say corporal punishment is the norm. A 2018 study by Agrasar, a nonprofit, found that nearly 80 percent of low-income schoolchildren surveyed in Gurugram city near capital New Delhi reported being beaten several times a week, and a majority of their parents approved of it and used it themselves at home.
Kawalpreet Kaur, a New Delhi-based lawyer, told Al Jazeera the problem lies in the law not being properly implemented. School authorities protect teachers, discourage complaints and pressure families to settle matters quietly, and complaints get buried.” Kaur also pointed to the judiciary’s apparent discomfort with prosecuting teachers, citing the example of a teacher in the southern Kerala state accused of caning a sixth-grade student. The court granted him bail, suggesting teachers should “carry a cane” as a psychological deterrent, and warning against “excessive” prosecution over “silly matters”.
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