A schoolteacher faces criminal action after she allegedly beat an eight-year-old student with a stick for not being attentive in the class.
The parents of the class 3 boy filed a police complaint after he returned home with bruised hands and legs on Thursday.
An x-ray showed a hairline fracture on the right leg below the knee.
The boy’s father, Naveen Kumar, said he decided to complain to the police after the school chairman spoke to him rudely when he rang him up to complain. The school is located in Chandra Layout, West Bengaluru.
The boy was allegedly beaten up by a teacher named Chaitra, who was taking the class as the regular instructor was on leave. The boy took her name when the parents asked him how he got the bruises.
The teacher had asked the students to make notes in their diaries. She found Kumar’s son writing Kannada instead, pulled him out of the bench and beat him with the stick, according to Kumar. “My son was only finishing his Kannada notes,” he told DH.
Kumar said that when he contacted the school chairman, the latter addressed him in the singular and hung up when he sought to complain. Kumar said that he then went to the jurisdictional Block Education Officer (BEO) and complained about the school and the teacher. He then followed it up with a police complaint.
According to the boy’s father, the school chairman called him up after he went to the police and “abused” the teacher.
“But to this day, no one from the school has come to our house to see the condition of my son,” he said. “I don’t mind teachers beating students when they are in class 7 or 8, but my son is in the third grade. They should be sensitive to such small children.”
An officer from the Chandra Layout police station said a case of assault had been opened and that the teacher and members of the school management would be questioned on Monday.
This newspaper tried to contact the school on the landline for comment but nobody responded.