Illegal but often tolerated, caning is rife in India’s school system, but the recent suicide of a 12-year-old pupil after a beating has brought the practice out of the shadows.
Rouvanjit Rawla, a pupil at the prestigious La Martiniere for Boys school in the eastern city of Kolkata, hanged himself in his room earlier this year after being caned for bringing stink bombs into class.
After spending months chasing the school for answers, his father, textile businessman Ajay Rawla, finally filed a police complaint against three teachers last month and is determined to press for justice.
PHOTO: AFP
“We were a jolly, happy family,” he said. “Just go onto Rouvan’s Facebook page and every one of his friends has called him a fun and friendly young boy. He used to be the life of the party.”
Mental health groups point out that suicides can rarely be attributed to a single reason, but Rawla is in no doubt that the caning by the school principal was the factor that pushed his son over the edge.
“These people are teachers. They are supposed to make your children better, stronger people, not drive them to death,” he said by telephone from Kolkata, fighting back tears.
A Supreme Court judgment in 2000 prohibited corporal punishment in all its forms in India. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, passed last year, also bans corporal punishment.
But as is often the case in India, the gap between liberal and well-meaning laws passed by the distant federal government in New Delhi and enforcement in local areas is huge.
According to a UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) report published in 2008, two out of three schoolchildren in India said they had been subjected to corporal punishment.
The practice is particularly prevalent in government-run schools, where the vast majority of cases (62 percent) were reported.
Lov Verma, secretary of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, says caning, beatings and slappings are still prevalent in schools all across the country.
“We cannot shut our eyes to the reality, we get umpteen cases of corporal punishment [reported to us]. Laws are there but that does not mean it is not happening,” he said.
A government study conducted by the Ministry of Women and Child Welfare Development in 2008 mirrored the UN findings: Two out of three children across 13 states had been victims of corporal punishment.
The reasons are multiple: cultural attitudes to violence, which are changing slowly in cities but remain entrenched in rural areas; lack of training for teachers; and large class sizes that make pupils hard to control.
Within the teaching profession, attitudes vary. Most schoolteachers publicly disavow violence.
“Most private schools in Delhi have greatly reduced corporal punishment, caning, being hit by the ruler, etc,” Springdales high school principal Jyoti Bose said. “It is all very old generation. We have to learn to negotiate and engage with the child.”
Herod Mullick, general secretary of Bongiyo Christiyo Porisheba, an umbrella organization of 700 Christian missionary schools in Kolkata, says some teachers resort to violence out of desperation.
“You do not allow caning and you do not have a proper procedure in place for counseling or other forms of disciplining, so both the children and teachers are lost in the matter,” he said.
Rounjit Rawla’s case has brought about a huge public outcry, largely because the case occurred in one of India’s oldest and most elite schools and to a middle class family. But as the UN and government of India research underlined, most cases of corporal punishment take place in public schools and go largely unrecorded and unheard off.
“India pampers its richer children and pedigree dogs; most of the kids in most schools are unprotected by society and state,” Supreme Court lawyer Rajeev Dhavan wrote in a column in the Mail Today newspaper.
The national bout of introspection also prompted Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan to recall his childhood experience of beatings at the hands of teachers.
“There was not a single year when our principal did not practice his Cambridge Blue tennis forehand on our bent-over posteriors,” Bachchan wrote on his blog.
“That was 1956; it is 2010 now,” Bachchan said. “Times have changed and so have circumstances.”
For Rouvanjit’s father in Kolkata, times did not change fast enough.
“As a father I need answers to my son’s death and I will fight till the end to get justice for Rouvan,” Rawla said.
Four people jailed in the landmark Hong Kong national security trial of "47 democrats" accused of conspiracy to commit subversion were freed today after more than four years behind bars, the second group to be released in a month. Among those freed was long-time political and LGBTQ activist Jimmy Sham (岑子杰), who also led one of Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy groups, the Civil Human Rights Front, which disbanded in 2021. "Let me spend some time with my family," Sham said after arriving at his home in the Kowloon district of Jordan. "I don’t know how to plan ahead because, to me, it feels
‘A THREAT’: Guyanese President Irfan Ali called on Venezuela to follow international court rulings over the region, whose border Guyana says was ratified back in 1899 Misael Zapara said he would vote in Venezuela’s first elections yesterday for the territory of Essequibo, despite living more than 100km away from the oil-rich Guyana-administered region. Both countries lay claim to Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens. Guyana has administered the region for decades. The centuries-old dispute has intensified since ExxonMobil discovered massive offshore oil deposits a decade ago, giving Guyana the largest crude oil reserves per capita in the world. Venezuela would elect a governor, eight National Assembly deputies and regional councilors in a newly created constituency for the 160,000
North Korea has detained another official over last week’s failed launch of a warship, which damaged the naval destroyer, state media reported yesterday. Pyongyang announced “a serious accident” at Wednesday last week’s launch ceremony, which crushed sections of the bottom of the new destroyer. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called the mishap a “criminal act caused by absolute carelessness.” Ri Hyong-son, vice department director of the Munitions Industry Department of the Party Central Committee, was summoned and detained on Sunday, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. He was “greatly responsible for the occurrence of the serious accident,” it said. Ri is the fourth person
At a calligraphy class in Hanoi, Hoang Thi Thanh Huyen slides her brush across the page to form the letters and tonal marks of Vietnam’s unique modern script, in part a legacy of French colonial rule. The history of romanized Vietnamese, or Quoc Ngu, links the arrival of the first Christian missionaries, colonization by the French and the rise to power of the Communist Party of Vietnam. It is now reflected in the country’s “bamboo diplomacy” approach of seeking strength through flexibility, or looking to stay on good terms with the world’s major powers. A month after Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) visited,
RSS