Corporal Punishment in Schools in India - A P...

Corporal Punishment in Schools in India - A Pilot Study

Author Name : Upagya Sharma

DOI: https://doi.org/10.56025/IJARESM.2023.116232722

ABSTRACT

India is home to almost 19 per cent of the world’s children. A study carried out in 2009-2010 by the National Commission for Protection of Children’s Rights found that 99.9% of the children involved in the study had experienced physical or verbal punishment. Corporal punishment not only instils fear and resentment towards authority in the child but also impacts his behaviour, making him either extremely timid or overly aggressive. This article intends to deliberate on how corporal punishment inflicted on children at Indian schools adversely affects their psyche and human right to live with dignity, how corporal punishment of children became an accepted phenomenon in almost every Indian household and to determine the level of understanding of students in relation to corporal punishment. The approach of the article is primarily empirical in nature though help has been sought from secondary data - reports from various government agencies and commissions, judgements from the Indian courts etc. This article is a preliminary study conducted in the city of Shimla (capital of Himachal Pradesh – a state in the Union of India), to see whether students understand their right to study in an environment that is free of the threat of corporal punishment.

Keywords: corporal punishment, duty of care of the schools/teachers, human rights of students.