As the blame game over failed child security pans out between schools, parents and law enforcing authorities, campuses are fast turning into Army fortresses with extremely high threat perceptions. SHAlINI SAKSENA and SANGEETA YADAV look into the issue to find out that all in the game are equally responsible for this sad mess
My son was his school topper both in academics and extra-curricular activities. like any other day, he got up early, got ready, had breakfast and left for school. He was excited about celebrating his friend Sarvesh’s birthday in school. little did we know that just an hour later, we would be collecting his lifeless body smeared in blood with the head almost falling off. He had been beaten up and his clothes were torn. I have been having sleepless nights thinking how much torture my son was put through. Who could have done this to my childIJ”, asks a hapless Barun Thakur, father of seven-year-old Pradyumann Thakur, a Class II student of Ryan International School, Bhondsi, who was brutally killed in the school’s washroom.
Thakur, who hails from Madhubani in Bihar, is now taking the rounds of police stations seeking justice.
“Schools have become easy targets because of callous administrations. The Government should monitor these schools, especially ones that have become commercial ventures. No other business gives you a 50 per cent like the school business and it has become an unscrupulous money-making business. What you know about Ryan International School is just the tip of the mess. Somebody at a high level in the school may be an accomplice to another crime and to cover this up, this murder may have taken place. If you look at the conductor confessing to his crime publicly, he seems to have been bought off,” social activist and director of Centre for Social Science, Dr Ranjana Kumari, says.
Kumari may have nothing to prove this charge, but Pradyumann’s father has a point. Though Ryan Pinto, CEO, Ryan International Group of Institutions, has claimed that the school has always followed rules, former students have a different story to tell.
It was in 2007 that the students of Ryan International School in Sector 10, Gurgaon, were shifted to Bhondsi on Sohna Road, an under-construction building with n boundary wall. “We were shifted to Bhondsi from Sector 40 which was 45 minutes away from my house. Our new building had no gates and walls and was open to farmlands all around it. The two operational floors were unfinished. It had cemented walls with nails coming out of it. Construction workers were all over the place and used the same washroom as the schoolboys. The bus was from a third party vendor and the drivers and conductors would also use the same washroom and walk on the campus freely,” former student Disha Sharma recalls.
She added, in such an atmosphere such incidents were waiting to happen. “They were flouting norms from day one. Getting permission from authorities to shift to an under-construction building with no walls around it was dubious. Security was a big concern. Such a renowned school took its students and their parents for granted,” Sharma says.
Pradyumann’s gruesome murder shows how endemic mysterious deaths, rapes, sexual assaults and molestations of children have become.
“Crime against children have increased manifold. Around 94,000 children are been victimised by heinous crimes annually. As chairman of the Child Rights Commission for three years, I had the opportunity to look into the role of institutes and schools. I got complaints from many prestigious Delhi schools about the safety of children being compromised and all round negligence. Children are being constantly exploited and abused but their safety is nowhere in the picture,” Amod Kanth, former Joint Commissioner of Delhi Police and the founder of the NGO Prayas, tells you.
Children can be easily scared and lured. Easy access to child pornography makes them easy targets, says Delhi- based sociologist Priya Kumar. “Our society is conservative. When people with little education watch porn they are unable to differentiate between real and fake,” she opines. Add to this the present-day aggressive culture sitting on a widening gap between rich and poor and you have cocktail of road rage, rape and murder.
"There was a time when children of Government employees went to Government schools. They had little contact with the rich who went to private schools. Not many had faith in private education back then. All that has changed,” Kumar says, pointing out how value systems have gone.
While some parents are still doing the rounds of the courts to seek justice for their children, many cases have been abandoned due to lack of evidence. Since the conviction rate is so low, the accused go scot-free. According to NCRB’s Crime In India 2015 report, 94,172 cases of crimes against children were registered in the country in 2015 as compared to 89,423 in 2014, showing an increase of 5.3 per cent.
“Crime against children is getting reported more often now but the criminal goes largely unpunished. Such cases should be put on fast track. If an accused rapist or molester is punished fast, it will set an example and stop people from walking on the same path,” says Sunita Nagpal, Principal, DPS, Sushant lok, Gurugram.
Just two days after the Ryan International School case, a five-year-old girl was allegedly raped by a security guard in the premises of Tagore Public School in Gandhi Nagar area of Shahdara. In most such cases, it is either the school staff member or the third party service provider who has been the culprit. Though the POCSO Act is a strict law created for protecting children, it is not well implemented. “No other country has such elaborate provisions against sexual offences. The definition of rape has changed completely. A child’s safety has to have accountability. In many schools, safety guidelines are violated daily. We don’t have a checklist and a protocol to monitor if safety guidelines are being followed,” Kanth says.
So then, who is really responsible for the safety of childrenIJ School authorities say it is unfair to hold the school management responsible for ensuring a 360-degree safety net over children while experts argue that the management is at fault for not effectively implementing guidelines.
“There are lakhs of schools in our country and a majority of them is Government schools and belong to very backward and poor areas. We cannot afford sophisticated sensors and alarms everywhere,” Kanth points out. So, it all comes down to sprucing up the chain of protection, responsibility and guardianship mores. “The child needs support and dependency, guardianship, protection and safety as his right. Be it at home, school or playground, every single person around the child should take the responsibility of guardianship. That’s how you will ensure a safe environment. No amount of technology and gadgets can help independently,” Kanth emphasises.
The clash between the POCSO Act and the CBSE guidelines has made the role of the teacher tough. “The provision in the POCSO Act which says it is mandatory to put teachers on the bus duty for the safety of children contradicts the guidelines given by CBSE and the Gurugram police, teachers point out, adding that they should not be given a non-academic role. We need clarity on that so that when we are employing a teacher, we can make their role clear. A teacher starts out at 6:40 am from her house and reaches home at 4 pm and she is being held accountable for every single child’s complete safety. I feel it is unfair to function like an army,” Nagpal says.
The unreasonable demands of parents make things worse, they say. “Even a nudge here or there on the bus is classified as bullying now. How much is the role of teacher thereIJ And if we put a lady security guard on the bus, the parents do not like it if she reprimands their child for misconduct on the bus. Can we also have guidelines for parents,” Nagpal says.
Arguments go on and the blame game never ends. In the midst, meanwhile, tiny tots as small as two-and-a-half-years of age are victimised. Take the case of the Xseed Pre-school at Sarjapur Road in Bengaluru. She was raped by Srinivas (25) from Tamil Nadu who was employed to drive the school van. The sobbing girl related the incident to her mother after she found her daughter’s undergarments in her schoolbag.
In another case in July, a four-year-old girl was allegedly raped by her 26-year-old school van driver in at outer Delhi’s Baba Haridass Nagar. The girl used to be the last one to be dropped home and that’s when the driver would force himself on her and threatened her with dire consequences if she spoke about it. But one day the girl reached home bleeding from her private parts and that was when her parents came to know of her ordeal.
In May 2017, the 57-year-old founder-trustee of a prominent Andheri school and a nursery teacher were booked for allegedly raping a three-year-old student. The teacher would take the girl to the trustee’s room, where she was assaulted. Both the culprits were booked under POCSO Act. The FIR mentions the accused sexually assaulting another three-year-old boy.
Gowri Ishwaran, educationist and former principal of Sanskriti School, feels that students travelling in private vans are most vulnerable to such crime. “Parents hire private vans for children to commute to school. Nobody does their police verification and since the schools are not involved in it, it makes children vulnerable. The police authorities need to look into this and punish those who flout the norms,” Ishwaran says. Talking about the security set-up DPS has, Nagpal says: “We have more than 75 per cent of the security guards as women and only 25 as men who do night duty and traffic management services. Our safety and security committee looks at disaster management safety, transport safety, etc. The committee comprises a parent, teacher and one member from an NGO. The committee meets twice a year. Police verification happens at the local and state levels and is a long process which needs to be made easier.”
Though all schools outsource services like security guards and catering teams for canteens, they need to set-up rigorous screening processes. Neil McWilliam, Head of School, Oberoi International School (OIS), says: “At OIS, all staff which comes into contact with kids undergoes a rigorous screening/vetting, which includes reference checks and police checks. Our security service is outsourced, but we insist that the personnel assigned to this school remain the same. In effect, they become our people and we give them training. We have security on every floor of the building and separate toilet facilities for adults and children,” he adds.
Advocate and social jurist Ashok Agarwal says the Centre needs to bring a new law of having 50 per cent parent representatives in school management committees. “Absolute power lies with the school making them corrupt and commercial. If a school management committee has 50 per cent parental representation, there will be a shift of power and they would have a say in decision-making safety, care and administration. The Right To Education Act allows Government schools to have 75 per cent parents in management committees out of which 50 per cent has to be women. But it has not been implemented properly. Whatever laws are available, it is the authority and police administration’s responsibility to make sure that it is been enforced properly in the schools,” Agarwal adds.
Dr Parth J Shah founder president of Centre For Civil Society (non-profit research and educational organisation) says that “lack of self-responsibility is a major reason for the mess. We are creating an environment where we feel that the other is to be blamed for every wrong in our lives and it is the responsibility of others to ensure we are not discomforted. There are larger social issues at play here,” he says.
Also, schools are becoming prey grounds as society at large relies on hired hand. We hire vans to drop our children to school. “These hired helps are not trained on dealing with children making the young ones extremely vulnerable,” Shah says.
“All these van drivers and conductors usually live together with 4-5 of them sharing a room. Mobile pornography is a huge menace. Child pornography is easily accessible. Earlier people believed that only girls can be targeted by sexual predators. But boys are more in the danger zone,” Kumari opines.
The solution lies in creating an environment where parents have information that will help them make calculated decisions about where their child should study. “We mostly go by hearsay. Instead, parents should have proper information about all schools which we don’t have at present. There should be a separate regulatory body like one has in banking and insurance for better management,” Shah concludes.
Advisory
The National Independent Schools Alliance (NISA) recently issued a new safety advisory to schools across India. It includes the following points:
1. Schools have well equipped CCTV surveillance system in all classrooms, corridors, staircases, main gate and strategic areas and have the display of the same surveillance in the Principal’s cabin or have a dedicated staff to monitor CCTV footage.
2. A committee of teachers and Parent Teacher Association be set up and carry surprise visits in schools to check if safety is in order. CCTV functioning to be checked regularly.
3. The schools must carry fire audit and drills for quick and safe evacuation during any contingency.
4. Students should be educated about “Good Touch and Bad Touch”.
5. Schools should carry out police verification of drivers and watchman/s and conduct training programmes for them. Keep a watch on their behavioural pattern.
6. Schools must involve parents and inform them about safety precautions taken.