Children’s Day has come and gone, singing paens on the rights of children. Still, fear seems to be stalking the City’s children.

Sangeetha, a 11-year-old student of a City school was brutally beaten up (on August 23) by seven teachers for not doing her Maths homework. Soon after Asish (10) almost lost his vision when the teacher’s cane aimed at his hand, hit him in his right eye. It took great parental effort to rid Sangeetha and Asish of the phobia they had developed of their schools.

In an effort to do away with corporal punishments across the country, the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights recently set up the Working Group for the "Protection of Children against Violence and Corporal Punishment in Schools." The Group has been entrusted with the task of checking cases of physical and emotional violence against children in government and private schools.

New commission
Dr V P Niranjanaradhya, Senior Research Officer, Centre for Child and the Law, National Law School of India University is the only person from the South on the Group. Besides being an expert on child right issues, he has collaborated with NGOs in sensitising teachers and people on alternatives to corporal punishment.
Blaming corporal punishment on the prevailing education system, he says: "The teacher assumes an all powerful position in current educational system, virtually imbuing him with authoritarian streaks and empowering him to mete out corporal punishment.”

Had a child's right to life, freedom and respect been honoured corporal punishment would never have even existed, he adds.

The Group plans do its bit in sensitising teachers across schools in the City and orient them to the ill effects of corporal punishment. The accent will be on making them realise that internal discipline is far more valuable than external discipline. The group will work towards setting up a state commission for protection of child rights to look into cases of violation. Corporal punishment will be treated as a criminal offence and the cases will be filed under the Indian Penal Code. 

G Kumar Naik, Commissioner of Directorate of Public Instruction thinks that a group set up exclusively to monitor and control corporal punishments in schools will go a long way in instilling fear in those who take to the whip.
After extensive campaign and awareness created by the government the cases of corporal punishments have come down, he observes.

“We need a specific law to make parents and teachers legally accountable for violence and abuse of authority. Further, there is a need to spell this liability in clear terms of law to promote respect for the law in terms of deterrence," Niranjanaradhya says.

Among Niranjanaradhya’s proposals are regular meetings of parents and child rights committees in schools. Children should be given the freedom and right to complain against any teacher who punishes them, he argues.
He points out that the mushrooming of private schools with the sole intent of making money, has only resulted in competitive embracing of strict discipline norms which only result in stringent actions even for minor violations like not cleaning shoes, or wearing a different colour socks or a shirt with creases.

Different forms of corporal punishment 

* Standing in the sun.
* Kneeling down.
* Standing on the bench.
* Making them raise their hands for long time
* Holding their ears with hands passed under the legs.
* Tying their hands.
* Making them do sit-ups.
* Caning and pinching.
* Twisting the ears.
* Slapping by the opposite sex.
* Scolding, abusing and humiliating.
* Labelling the child according to his or her misbehaviour
* Taking the child to every class humiliating him/her in front of all the students.