STAMPED IMPRESSIONS
Teachers or terrorisers?
Reeta Sharma

ONCE again a teacher-cum-principal has used his power and position to trample the tender mind of a student. This time, the Principal, Subash Aggarwal of the Sector 28 Government School, liberally used his authority to inflict physical punishment upon the child.

This incident is a reminder that violence against students at the hands of teachers is on the rise. This case is not the first of its kind. The number of cases of corporal punishment, humiliation, mental trauma and vindictiveness by teachers against students has witnessed a phenomenal rise in the past one decade. Teachers have become so brutal that they have even killed students. To substantiate, I will illustrate some recent incidents:

In October 2001, two teachers, Rattan Lal and Subash Chand of Government Senior Secondary School at Ajrana Kalan in Kurukshetra, had beaten up Ram Singh (15), a Class VIII student, so severely that he died that very day while being taken to the PGI, Chandigarh. The Kurukshetra police had registered a criminal case under Sections 302 and 34 of the IPC against both the teachers.

The second case is that of Jagroop Singh, a Class X student of Senior Secondary School at Pakhowal in Ludhiana, who was again so brutally beaten up by his teacher, Jatinderpal Kaur, in July 2002 that he succumbed to the injuries that very day. Panchayats of the surrounding villages had blocked traffic before the cremation of the boy to pressurise the authorities to arrest the teacher. Although, the police swung into action by arresting the teacher but the DEO’s inquiry only resulted in the transfer of Jatinderpal Kaur to another school.

The third case is that of the gruesome death of a 10-year-old schoolboy of Palampur, who had died on the spot when his teacher, Onkar Nath, in September 2001, had kicked him, damaging his testicles besides causing internal injuries. In this case, the Himachal Pradesh High Court had taken suo motu notice, which had eventually prompted registering of the case under Section 304 of the IPC against the teacher. However, Onkar Nath absconded and even tried to bribe the child’s uncle with Rs 30,000, which the uncle had actually accepted and tried to twist the case. Thankfully, the uncle is cooling his heels in jail.

The incident of a Class VII student of St. John’s High School in Sector 26, which took place in January 2001, still haunts people of Chandigarh. His Punjabi teacher, Ms S Sahni, had repeatedly hit him on his head, despite having been forewarned that the student was recovering from a head injury. This had aggravated the injury, resulting in the cerebrospinal fluid leaking out of his nose.

Despite such an alarming situation, the teacher had remained defiant. The Punjab and Haryana High Court had to step in by ordering an independent inquiry by advocate Jaishri Thakur. The teacher was held guilty and was finally dismissed from job.

A 12-year-old girl of Government High School of Sector 38 had committed suicide in 1998 by setting herself on fire because three of her teachers, Ravinder Kaur, K P Singh and Bhagirath Singh, had thrashed her. A three-member committee formed by the then DPI, Schools, had held the teachers guilty of inflicting corporal punishment to the student.

I can continue to quote hundreds of such cases to substantiate the point that teachers have started treating students as if they were hardened criminals and not wards under their care.

The reasons why teachers have become so brutal and irrational are that they are not only passing their own frustrations and stress on to unsuspecting children but also the fact that they have entered the profession without having any aptitude and calibre for it. It happens only in this country that a mere degree of JBT, B.Ed, etc. can qualify one to be a schoolteacher, irrespective of one’s attitude and psychological bent of mind. The teachers in other parts of the world have to take aptitude tests before they can go to classrooms.

What is sad is that not only are we saddled with such teachers but the system too has not evolved any accountability of the teachers. Unless a child dies, when the intervention of the police becomes inevitable, the teachers go scot-free in almost all other cases.

In most such cases, the only punishment meted out to teachers for brutally punishing hapless children is that they are transferred form one school to the other. In private schools, even this is not required. There is not a single example before me where the school authorities or the management concerned took the teacher to task for having beaten up a child for a trivial matter.

The collective consciousness of both the teachers’ community as well as the so-called parents’ associations of the schools is long dead. Those heading the parents’ associations are often handpicked by the school authorities. The victims and their parents often get isolated when such parents’ associations join hands with guilty teachers and the school authorities.

The ideal solutions to this growing menace are that teachers should be selected only if they are kind, considerate and possess the missionary zeal to teach. Secondly, the teachers should be given compulsory training in handling hyper and problem children. Thirdly, teachers should be physically examined for they may be suffering themselves from certain psychological disorders, which prompt them to indulge in such cruel acts that endanger the life of students.

This feature was published on December 20, 2003