The safety of children has always been a cause of a great concern and the recent drowning of a six-year-old boy in Delhi’s Ryan International School has further highlighted the problem. PRAKRITI ROY delves into the issue in a bid to find out why our children are not entirely safe when left in the care of a school or a day-care centre
January, 2012: A British headmaster of Trio World School in Bangalore arrested for sending vulgar messages to one of his boy students.
June, 2014: Owner of Chandraprabha Charitable Trust in Maharashtra arrested for raping five minors in his boarding school.
July 14, 2014: Seven-year-old girl raped in Bangalore’s Vibgyor High School.
November 17, 2015: Three-year-old nursery student dies in school after getting head stuck in rickety elevator.
November, 2015: Three male teachers arrested for sexually abusing a Class IV girl for over a year.
January 12, 2016: A 65-year-old man arrested for raping a four-year-old girl for four months at his daughter-in-law’s crèche in Ghaziabad’s Crossing Republic Housing Society.
January 14, 2016: Eight-year-old schoolgirl of Millennium National School in Pune drowns during swimming practice.
January 30, 2016: Six-year-old Divyansh drowns in a water tank in Delhi’s Ryan International School.
February 6, 2016: Seventh grader in Ranchi’s Sapphire International School found murdered after being subjected to sexual assault by his teacher.
Each of these instances show up the perils that our children face in schools, a place where parents send their children to get an education in safe custody of school authorities.
However, a string of cases show that the safety and protection of children in schools, day-care centres and crèches is not something that is given much importance in the larger course of things. The recent case of Divyansh drowning in Ryan International School, Delhi, prompted the Education Minister to order an inquiry into the safety procedures followed by schools in Delhi-NCR. More often than not, these initiatives are fuelled by incidents such as Ryan and fizzle out soon after.
Komal Ganotra, CRY spokesperson, who has been associated with protection and welfare of children for many years talks of the root of this problem in India: “Safety is not just a physical notion. What is absent in India is the entire concept of protection and safety. It is usually visualised as physical safety, but that is just one aspect.” She says, the threat to protection is in multiple ways and all of these have to be addressed. Ownership from the Education Department is urgently needed.
Ganotra feels that there are many things that need to be taken care of to better address the issue of children’s safety. First is the infrastructure, people and processes; protection has to be across all areas but safety norms are not comprehensive to address all areas. Second, the protocol of intervening is absent there is actually no system. Third is the redress mechanism which has been put out but not respected in spirit.
There is, in fact, a Child Care and Protection Act in India. It has a number of rules like ‘it is the duty of every licensee to ensure that every child in his home receives at all times careful and humane treatment and suitable education’. But this is limited only to places like orphanages which are licensed properly by the Ministry. For the protection of children in schools and day-cares, it is up to the police to draft safety regulations like the ones done by Gurgaon Police. But what remains a consistent challenge is the implementation.
Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP-South Delhi) Prem Nath, who was handling the Ryan International drowning case, tells you: “The Delhi Education Act (1973) has under its ambit regulations related to buildings, structures, amenities etc. It also specifies the responsibility of the principal, teachers and other staff (like gardeners). Auditing is done by the Department of Education. There are no guidelines that the police have made for schools.”
There are many reasons for the lax implementation. Ganotra says: “In the policy agenda, children are not very significant. They are not given their due importance. Moreover, under the Education Department, schooling technically begins from six years of age. So the children younger than that are just sidelined. All the norms are developed for schools which take children over the age of six. And there is hardly any monitoring by the Education Department.”
Good surveillance is the biggest challenge in these matters and that is what co-founder of Footprints Childcare, Purvesh Sharma, wants to focus on. A graduate from IIT, Sharma left his engineering job and went into the childcare industry when he realised the vacuum in this space after having a son of his own. He went to the US for training and now runs all his centres in NCR region along international guidelines.
“Safety is the prime concern; it’s the most important thing for the child and his parents,” he says. “There are Government rules and regulations but we follow the international guidelines. We keep in mind things like space that each child needs, adult to child ratio. We have installed CCTVs everywhere and the live feed is broadcasted to parents. We also have an app so that parents can get real-time updates about their child. Our staff is very well-trained and knows that they are on camera all the time. They are screened for past criminal and medical records and we have tied up with agencies for this screening,” Sharma says. Moreover, a crucial factor for many parents, all the centres are run completely by female staff.
Ganotra feels that the crèches and day-care centres are actually a much bigger problem as they do not come under any Ministry. She opines that day-care centres are much more scary than the school system. Schools at least have proper registration, parent-teacher associations and so on. “Crèches do not have any process of registration or a standard of running. The risk factor is much more in these places,” she tells you.
The private schools which offer pre-schooling come under the Education Department while the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme is run by the anganwadis and comes under the Ministry of Women and Child Development (MWCD). Since there are two different Ministries, there tends to be a gap in convergence and that is where implementation becomes a problem.
Crèches and play-schools are not owned and governed in terms of any standards. There are basically no guidelines for them and they are not under any ministry. But these are the ones that are maximum in number, according to Ganotra. Since they have no database, no standards and no monitoring mechanisms, disasters are bound to happen.
Sharma feels that the Government should pitch in with much stricter implementation and regulations than what exists right now. Without any regulations, people are doing things as per themselves and thus, the children are at risk.
In a situation like this, it becomes very difficult for parents to entrust their child in the care of someone else while they are away at work. “An entire set of systems needs to be integrated; it isn’t merely a one-time measure. A risk audit must be done to assess the risks. Guidelines for so many things are not there floors, wires, child-adult ratio, child-space ratio. Children are not educated on how to deal with and report abuse, or that they should be suspicious of certain things. Schools are not equipped to deal with many problems and the staff lacks training.
“It is not just the teachers who need to be considered. Everyone, right from the taxi or bus driver, maids, caretaker, maintenance people, should be assessed. What usually happens is that the issue of safety is taken up with only the top management but these are the people who are actually constantly in touch with your children,” Ganotra suggests.
The DCP tells you that the Delhi Police has a standing order for all the schools in South Delhi that potential victims of sexual harassment must be educated. A woman constable, along with an NGO, imparts this training under the Nirbheek scheme. “Children are encouraged to report crimes against them by anonymously dropping notes in the Nirbheekta box. We have even registered cases through this,” says Nath.
However, with players like Footprints in the industry, the situation has become better a tiny bit as they follow regulation and guidelines. The parents who go to these places are also much more aware of issues of their child’s safety and they tend to ask a ton of questions before enrolling their child somewhere. The best way to choose an institute for your child would be to ask the right questions and go by other parents’ recommendations. Questions about systems of training, safety procedures, safety reporting to parents, how aware are teachers and maids, bus driver credentials, measures that teachers take must be asked. The existing guidelines are mostly superficial so one has to go deeper to understand the workings of an individual institute.
The Government policies do not take much cognizance of the age group below six years. In fact, even the New Education Policy, open for discussion on the MyGov website, doesn’t address this age group. This is because, in India, most people don’t realise that the first five years are the most important.
Apart from this, everything takes more time in India because of the system that exists. Protection is a nascent concept in India, and thus is it given a backseat because India struggles with so many other areas that need investment that children are not getting the priority they should.
Divyansh’s drowning, which triggered all the debate on children’s safety, still remains unsolved. Nath tells you that five people have been arrested on charges of negligence but the case is still under investigation. Ganotra feels that while the increasing number of incidents where children are harmed are tragic, they are pushing towards a positive change.
Ponder points
Childline conducted a survey called National Study on Child Protection Mechanism. As per them, “Child protection is about protecting children from or against any perceived or real danger to their life, their personhood and childhood. It is about reducing their vulnerability to any kind of harm — social, psychological and emotional. It must ensure that no child falls out of the security and safety net and those who do, receive necessary care and protection and are brought back into the safety net.”
Here are some key findings of the survey for public service education schools:
· 28% schools did not have separate toilets for boys and girls.
· Only 4% of the schools provide filtered water to children. 77% schools provide non-
filtered water to the children. 19% of schools did not provide any water facility for the children.
· 14% of the schools surveyed didn’t have even the most basic facility of a first-aid box to deal with a medical emergency.
· less than 2% of schools had school counsellors.
· Only 12% of the respondents (the principal) have undergone any training in child rights and child protection.
· 10% schools reported having a child protection policy. 1% schools have a sexual harassment policy.
· 3% of schools reported having grievance committees for issues relating to SC/ST and human rights issues, 2% for gender discrimination and 4% for issues related to corporal punishment.
· The percentage of schools that make available a complaint book or a complaint box for children is as low as 20% and 21% respectively.
· 64% schools said they take no measures to ensure safety of children outside school premises.
· Only 5% of schools have no corporal punishment meted out to children. 33% of schools resort to beating and 12% to humiliating children in front of their peers as a form of punishment
· Of the 36% of schools that reported abuse, 21% of schools took follow-up action against the abuse.
· Display of awareness material on child protection issues in schools — child labour 16%, child marriage 8%, child sexual abuse 5%.
The survey concludes: “The findings of this study corroborated a commonly held perception that children in the country are accorded the least priority in planning and implementation of public services or amenities. It was learned that other than those spaces directly charged with the protection of children, almost all spaces exhibited a low level of sensitivity to children and low levels of preparedness for child protection. The study is not a situation assessment of children, but an assessment of the presence of systems, mechanisms and processes of child protection in these spaces. It recommends the coming together of a national child protection network that would work towards sharing, collating and developing tools and knowledge in the domain of child protection. It extends an opportunity to all to take forward the initiative of making spaces accessible and safe for children.”