A teacher’s slap, student’s death revive India’s corporal punishment debate

A teacher’s slap, student’s death revive India’s corporal punishment debate Pranay Teja’s death raises a question India has not fully answered: why, more than a decade after the ban, is it still affecting children routinely? 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. Recommended Stories list of 4 items- list 1 of 4Outrage in India over death of six-year-old ‘slapped’ by his teacher - list 2 of 4India’s ‘Cockroach’ movement makes schools next battleground against Modi - list 3 of 4Indian student dies after caning in classroom - list 4 of 4‘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. 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? 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. 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. “The RTE Act clearly prohibits physical punishment and mental harassment, but it does not create a strong standalone criminal offence,” she said. “Cases are often pushed into general criminal laws, treated as minor incidents of either ‘hurt’ or ‘discipline’. 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”. A similar case in neighbouring Karnataka state, involving an instructor accused of beating another sixth-grader with sticks, is being heard by a court over a plea to quash the proceedings. Kaur said such instances end up justifying corporal punishment under the guise of “deemed parental consent”, and go against the law’s mandate. Sanctioned by scriptures The word “corporal” comes from the Latin corpus, meaning “body”. Its most common forms are spanking, slapping, hitting with an object, pinching, or caning. It also includes flogging, whipping, or branding for criminal offences. Many in India believe it started in schools after the British colonised the subcontinent in the 19th century. But historian Ruchika Sharma says the practice predates British rule by centuries, attributing it to India’s rigid caste system, a centuries-old hierarchy ranking people at birth from Brahmins at the top to “Dalits”, a historically persecuted community formerly referred to as the “untouchables”, at the bottom. Sharma said the Arthashastra, an ancient Sanskrit treatise on statecraft, prescribes punishment for peasants who fail to pay taxes, while the Manusmriti, another ancient Hindu text, sets out graded, caste-based punishments for disrespect. Manusmriti, according to Sharma, recommends that a “Shudra”, the most underprivileged caste person, who speaks ill of a Brahmin should have his tongue cut off, while a “Kshatriya”, a warrior caste, committing the same offence faces only a fine. Sharma said the British did not invent corporal punishment in India, but normalised and systematised it within the education system. “The reason why the British are important is simply that the Indian education system has taken a lot from them,” she told Al Jazeera. Sharma said both the East India Company and later the British crown built their apparatus of order around flogging and caning, formalised through laws like the Whipping Acts of 1864 and 1909. In that context, even the schools established by the British carried the same assumption: that caning was a legitimate instrument of moral formation. In 2015, the National Commission for Scheduled Castes and child rights groups held a hearing in which 44 children from 14 states testified about identity-based discrimination, including punishment for offences as minor as asking for a second helping of midday meal food. A 2016 report by the International Dalit Solidarity Network compiled testimony from hearings across Indian states describing corporal punishment, forced labour and exclusion from midday meals, patterns pushing marginalised children out of education altogether. A 2022 study in the International Journal of Educational Development found the effects of corporal punishment on children’s cognitive outcomes were significantly severer for children from disadvantaged caste groups than privileged-caste backgrounds. ‘Dalit child more likely to be punished’ The colonial inheritance of a more institutionalised corporal punishment in schools did not end with India’s independence in 1947. For generations of Indians now in their 40s, 50s and 60s, a slap, a ruler across the palm, or standing outside class in the sun were unremarkable punishments, often defended as necessary for discipline. However, what distinguishes many of India’s severest corporal punishment cases is not only their brutality, but who is on the receiving end. In August 2022, nine-year-old Inder Meghwal, a Dalit student in Rajasthan state, died weeks after his teacher allegedly beat him for touching a water pot reserved for the teacher’s personal use. “A Dalit child would likely be punished more severely than a non-Dalit one,” Sharma, the historian, said. “That chain is unbroken, right from the Manusmriti and Arthashastra to today, because the caste system itself is unbroken.” Only weeks before the Rajasthan incident, a Muslim couple in Uttar Pradesh state alleged their son was beaten to death by school staff after he was accused, along with two other boys, of stealing a watch. His mother said her son was singled out because the other two boys were Hindu. In August 2023, a teacher in Uttar Pradesh’s Muzaffarnagar district instructed her entire class to slap a seven-year-old Muslim classmate, Mohammad Altamash. In a video that went viral, the teacher, Tripta Tyagi, a privileged-caste Hindu woman, was heard using a derogatory term for Muslims and telling the class that Muslim children should be removed, as she urged the children to hit harder. The incident triggered outrage, with many experts saying the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Uttar Pradesh was fostering a “politics of hate”, a charge the party rejected. The Supreme Court later ordered the child be shifted to another school and that the state should bear the cost of his education. Aasif Mujtaba, who runs a nonprofit in New Delhi, told Al Jazeera that being a Muslim makes a child an easy target. “It is very easy for teachers and students to mark you as others and aliens,” he said. “Whether it’s a Dalit affected by caste hierarchy or a Muslim affected by communal hierarchy, otherisation is common in both cases, and when otherised, you’re susceptible to attacks.” Mujtaba said the most damaging punishment often leaves no bruise. “There is a punishment bigger than corporal punishment that might not come under its purview. But that is a silent killer,” he said, citing teachers who mock a Muslim student’s name, use slurs like “miyan”, or call a child a “terrorist”. “Only those cases get reported that come on social media or CCTV. But if the deaths of three students get reported, there are thousands more facing this casteist and communal trauma,” he said. ‘Structural nature of discrimination’ Ratna Singh, a lawyer associated with India’s Gen Z-led Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), told Al Jazeera the abuse in schools stems from a basic imbalance of power compounded by low legal awareness. Teachers often believe “they have the authority to treat a child however they want” since children rarely complain, she said. The CJP, which recently led nationwide antigovernment protests, is campaigning to reform government schools, mainly in rural areas. Kaur said the law’s narrow framing of corporal punishment is problematic. “Dalit and Adivasi [Indigenous] students have specific protections under the Prevention of Atrocities Act, but Muslim students do not have an equivalent identity-specific law,” she told Al Jazeera. “Even under the RTE Act, school authorities often focus on the physical act and ignore the discriminatory motive.” Discrimination, she said, is rarely a single event. “It is discursive and cumulatively built through repeated insults, stereotypes and selective punishment. A single incident may look minor, but repeated acts communicate to marginalised students that they do not belong,” she told Al Jazeera. Kaur said fixing the problem requires mandatory reporting, independent complaint mechanisms outside school authorities, and greater attention to patterns rather than isolated events. “The real gap in Indian law is a failure to recognise the structural and continuing nature of discrimination as it moves from the classroom to school administrations and to the courts,” she said. Back in Visakhapatnam, it has been nearly a week since Teja’s death. Andhra Pradesh’s Education Department says its inquiry is ongoing, and that “sensitisation” programmes are being planned for teachers to deal with students more “sensitively, responsibly and with humanity”. For Prasad and his family, however, that promise sits alongside a more immediate demand: accountability, and an acknowledgement that what happened in his late son’s school was not an isolated act.