Arunachal school makes female students strip as punishment; NHRC asks for report

Bijay Sankar Bora
Tribune News Service
Guwahati, December 1

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The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has taken suo moto cognisance of a media report that 88 schoolgirls were made to strip as punishment in a school in Arunachal Pradesh’s Papum Pare district.

The students, all from Classes 6 and 7, were forced to strip by their teachers at the Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya for not admitting to having written vulgar words directed at the school’s headmaster on a piece of paper on November 23, 2017.

The rights commission wrote to chief secretary of the state government demanding a report of the incident, as well as action taken against the teachers and the steps taken for counselling the students involved. The report is due in four weeks.

It has also asked the Union Ministry of Human Resource Development’s secretary if it had issued any guidelines for protection of the students from such maltreatment or humiliation to the states, and the status of its implementation. The ministry has also been given four weeks.

In its letter, the commission says that the act was inexcusable, the schoolgirls’ right to dignity had been violated and that they would take time to recover from the incident.

Media reports suggest that the victims and their parents approached the All Sagalee Students Union (ASSU) in Arunachal Pradesh on November 27, 2017, to report the case. The union approached police, which registered an FIR.