Six-Year-Old Boy Dies After Teacher Slaps Him for Homework

New Delhi, India – Around noon on Thursday, Krishna Prasad got a phone call from a friend saying his six-year-old son, Pranay Teja, had collapsed at school and was being rushed to a public hospital. By the time Prasad arrived at King George Hospital in Visakhapatnam, a coastal city in southern Andhra Pradesh state, Teja was already dead. Prasad makes his living cooking for families in homes.

Grainy security camera footage from the classroom shows the incident clearly. A teacher slapped Teja for allegedly failing to complete his homework. The video captures him standing in line, looking distressed and pleading with her. She pulls him closer and strikes him. Within seconds, he falls onto her. Other teachers rushed forward to try cardiopulmonary resuscitation before taking the boy to the hospital, where doctors declared him 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 case is still under investigation. But this tragedy brings up a question India has not fully answered: why, more than a decade after the ban, 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. The law came into force the next year. It 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. Courts have repeatedly held that corporal punishment is incompatible with a child's right to dignity.

Yet gaps remain 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. A majority of their parents approved of it and used it themselves at home.

Kawalpreet Kaur, a lawyer based in New Delhi, 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. She cited the example of a teacher in the southern Kerala state accused of caning a sixth-grade student. The incident highlights how fear and silence keep the practice alive despite clear laws on paper.

The court granted bail to the accused and told teachers they should keep a cane on hand as a psychological deterrent. Judges also warned against excessive prosecution over what they called silly matters. A similar case in neighbouring Karnataka involves an instructor charged with beating another sixth-grader using sticks. That matter is currently before a court hearing a plea to quash the proceedings. Kaur noted that such incidents end up justifying corporal punishment under the guise of deemed parental consent while going against the law's mandate.

The word corporal comes from the Latin corpus, which means body. Its most common forms include spanking, slapping, hitting with an object, pinching, or caning. It also covers flogging, whipping, or branding for criminal offences. Many in India believe this practice took root in schools after British colonisation began in the 19th century. Historian Ruchika Sharma argues the tradition predates that rule by centuries and links it to India's rigid caste system. That hierarchy ranked people at birth from Brahmins at the top down to Dalits, a historically persecuted community formerly called untouchables, at the bottom.

Sharma pointed out that the Arthashastra, an ancient Sanskrit treatise on statecraft, prescribes punishment for peasants who fail to pay taxes. The Manusmriti, another ancient Hindu text, sets out graded punishments based on caste for disrespect. According to Sharma, the Manusmriti recommends cutting off the tongue of a Shudra, the most underprivileged caste person, if he speaks ill of a Brahmin. A Kshatriya, a warrior caste member, committing the same offence would face only a fine.

Sharma said the British did not invent corporal punishment in India but normalised and systematised it within the education system. The reason why the British are important is simply that the Indian education system has taken a lot from them, she told Al Jazeera. Both the East India Company and later the British crown built their apparatus of order around flogging and caning. Laws like the Whipping Acts of 1864 and 1909 formalised this practice. In that context, even schools established by the British carried the assumption that caning was a legitimate instrument of moral formation.

In 2015, the National Commission for Scheduled Castes and child rights groups held a hearing where 44 children from 14 states testified about identity-based discrimination. Their accounts included punishment for offences as minor as asking for a second helping of midday meal food. 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. These patterns push marginalised children out of education altogether. A 2022 study in the International Journal of Educational Development found that the effects of corporal punishment on children's cognitive outcomes were significantly severer for children from disadvantaged caste groups than for those from privileged-caste backgrounds.

The colonial inheritance of institutionalised corporal punishment did not end with India's independence in 1947. For generations of Indians now in their 40s, 50s and 60s, a slap, a ruler across the palm, or standing outside class in the sun were unremarkable punishments often defended as necessary for discipline. However, what distinguishes many of India's severest corporal punishment cases is not only their brutality but who receives them. 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. A Dalit child would likely be punished more severely than a non-Dalit one, Sharma said.

That chain is unbroken, right from the Manusmriti and Arthashastra to today, because the caste system itself is unbroken." This harsh reality plays out in classrooms across India where children face violence based on their identity. Only weeks before a recent incident in Rajasthan, a Muslim couple in Uttar Pradesh state alleged their son was beaten to death by school staff after he was accused, along with two other boys, of stealing a watch. His mother said her son was singled out because the other two boys were Hindu.

In August 2023, a teacher in Uttar Pradesh's Muzaffarnagar district instructed her entire class to slap a seven-year-old Muslim classmate, Mohammad Altamash. A video that went viral showed the teacher, Tripta Tyagi, using derogatory terms for Muslims and telling the class that Muslim children should be removed while she urged the students to hit harder. The incident triggered widespread outrage with many experts saying the governing Bharatiya Janata Party in Uttar Pradesh was fostering a politics of hate, a charge the party rejected. 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 makes a child an easy target. It is very easy for teachers and students to mark you as others and aliens, he said. Whether it is a Dalit affected by caste hierarchy or a Muslim affected by communal hierarchy, otherisation is common in both cases, and when otherised, you are susceptible to attacks. Mujtaba said the most damaging punishment often leaves no bruise. There is a punishment bigger than corporal punishment that might not come under its purview, but that is a silent killer, he said citing teachers who mock a Muslim student's name or use slurs like miyan or call a child a terrorist. Only those cases get reported that come on social media or CCTV. But if the deaths of three students get reported, there are thousands more facing this casteist and communal trauma.

Ratna Singh, a lawyer associated with India's Gen Z-led Cockroach Janta Party, told Al Jazeera the abuse in schools stems from a basic imbalance of power compounded by low legal awareness. Teachers often believe they have the authority to treat a child however they want since children rarely complain, she said. The CJP recently led nationwide antigovernment protests and is campaigning to reform government schools mainly in rural areas. Kaur noted the law's narrow framing of corporal punishment is problematic. Dalit and Adivasi students have specific protections under the Prevention of Atrocities Act, but Muslim students do not have an equivalent identity-specific law, she told Al Jazeera. Even under the RTE Act school authorities often focus on the physical act and ignore the discriminatory motive. Discrimination is rarely a single event. It is discursive and cumulatively built through repeated insults stereotypes and selective punishment.

A single incident might seem small at first glance, but repeated acts send a clear message to marginalized students that they do not belong. Kaur told Al Jazeera this reality. She argued that solving the problem demands mandatory reporting and independent complaint channels that exist outside school authorities. Attention must shift from isolated events to broader patterns of behavior.

"The real gap in Indian law is a failure to recognise the structural and continuing nature of discrimination as it moves from the classroom to school administrations and to the courts," she said. The words were stark, pointing to a systemic rot rather than just individual mistakes.

Back in Visakhapatnam, nearly a week has passed since Teja died. Andhra Pradesh's Education Department says its inquiry is ongoing. Officials state that "sensitisation" programmes are being planned for teachers so they can deal with students more "sensitively, responsibly and with humanity."

For Prasad and his family, however, that promise sits alongside a more immediate demand: accountability. They need an acknowledgement that what happened in his late son's school was not an isolated act. The community waits to see if promises will turn into real change or just empty words.