A teacher’s slap, student’s death revive India’s corporal punishment debate
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.
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Key Facts
- Fact 1: Outlawed, still prevalent 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.
- Fact 2: 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.
- Fact 3: 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.
- Fact 4: Many in India believe it started in schools after the British colonised the subcontinent in the 19th century.
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.
Outrage in India over death of six-year-old ‘slapped’ by his teacher India’s ‘Cockroach’ movement makes schools next battleground against Modi Indian student dies after caning in classroom ‘Rampant discrimination’ in India’s schools 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.
(Original synthesis pending human/AI review — generated by the stub provider by selecting real sentences from the source material, not by writing new analysis or commentary.)
Original source: Al Jazeera
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