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.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of