Tragic Death of a Schoolboy Revives India's Debate Over Corporal Punishment and Discrimination

A view of an empty classroom in a school in New Delhi [File: Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters]

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.

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?

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.

Many in India believe the practice 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. 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. Sharma said the British did not invent corporal punishment in India, but normalised and systematised it within the education system, formalised through laws like the Whipping Acts of 1864 and 1909.

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. 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. 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.

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. 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 of stealing a watch. In August 2023, a teacher in Uttar Pradesh’s Muzaffarnagar district, Tripta Tyagi, instructed her entire class to slap a seven-year-old Muslim classmate, Mohammad Altamash, while using derogatory terms. 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 or a Dalit makes a child an easy target for otherisation and attacks. 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. Kaur noted that fixing the problem requires mandatory reporting, independent complaint mechanisms outside school authorities, and greater attention to patterns rather than isolated events.

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. 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.