Caning students continues to be popular among schoolteachers in West Bengal. And so a little girl in Class II in Midnapore had to spend this Diwali nursing the 12 raw welts that her teacher left on her because the little one could not understand an arithmetic problem. But the fact remains that teachers here in the state do not stop at hurting and humiliating: they are convinced that only terrorizing students in the name of punishment will deter misconduct. There have been a number of reports on other, unique forms of punishment. Two boys studying in Class I in a school in Mogra, Hooghly, were locked up in a trunk for three hours by their class teacher before being rescued by his colleagues. Earlier this year, a six-year-old girl in a city preparatory school was beaten with a heavy ruler. This left her too traumatized to go back to the school. And for those who think that such brutalities are committed only on the young ? a Class VIII girl in Thakurpukur, Calcutta, was asked to perform 150 squats in the sun and in front of all her classmates because she had been found talking in class.

One would have thought that in such grim circumstances, the circular from the state?s director of school education, A.K. Biswas, to the heads of all primary and secondary schools, prohibiting caning or other types of corporal punishment would help relieve students of their teachers? wrath. Clearly, the reality is far from that. The circular touches upon the subject of punishment of the guilty teachers very vaguely ? teachers who resort to such punishment will be ?strictly dealt with?. The details of the penalty, the reports say, are being worked out.

As if to cover up for the ambiguity, a government official hastily added that the penalty would range from warning to suspension, depending on the seriousness of the offence. The dithering on the issue of punishing teachers leaves room for much scepticism. Introducing prohibition of corporal punishment in schools is all very well, but its proper implementation is the trickier part.

There are other things to be looked into. Students, even when they are at the receiving end of physical abuse, find it difficult to report the errant teachers. Such submissiveness is partly conditioned, but has more to do with the fear and apprehension of being victimized by the teachers. Besides, considering the young age of the victims, all that the guilty teachers have to do is introduce an element of doubt into the allegation, if reported against.

In fact, there have been reports of teachers turning the tables on the victims cleverly so that the blame is shifted to the accusing student. An incident in Agartala saw the headmaster of a school come to the defence of a teacher who had beaten up his students, saying that the teacher had only overreacted. Such abuse of power seems to have got legitimized over the years.

Biswas?s circular is in keeping with the recommendation of educationists to do away with corporal punishment, which is not only useless but harmful too. Quite often, such punishment is accompanied by the emotional abuse of a child ? including verbal and mental abuse. The effects of such abuse are difficult to gauge.

A few cases will illustrate this better. In August, 2003, Sadhan Pal, a headmaster in Malda, ordered the third-graders to strip for not doing their homework. Some complied, and those who did not were caned ruthlessly. In Cooch Behar, Dipankar Sil, a Class IV student of Sharada Shisutirtha, was locked in the toilet for several hours under the suspicion that he had stolen two rupees from a classmate.

Keeping aside questions of whether these students deserve such horrific punishment, such maltreatment leaves the victims withdrawn and shaken, and they take a long time to recover from the humiliation suffered.

That is probably why the circular prescribes a ?conducive atmosphere?? presumably one with a healthy teacher-student relationship ? as a more productive means of teaching and learning in schools. But if this is what the directorate of school education sincerely believes, it needs to re-think the concept of alternative punishments in schools. There is more to be done than simply paying lip service to the idea of banning a particular mode of punishment.

There are other issues which have received less attention than they deserve. The common thread that binds all incidents of corporal punishment is that they have taken place in rural areas or little-known schools in the cities. If the focus is shifted to well-known and relatively bigger schools, the picture is not very different. The power relationship between a teacher and his students is very much in place, albeit with some variations.

Punishment in the big city schools may not take obvious forms such as caning or spanking, but the effects are no less intense. Subjugation and coercion are subtler ? and examples abound. There are at least two cases when, after parents of students studying in premier city schools protested against a substantial hike in the fees, their children were ?targeted? in a variety of ways. One way was to make a child stand in the school corridor for three hours, and exclude her from participating in a programme for which she had been selected earlier.

It is not surprising that city-based psychologists have noticed a rise in the number of children being brought in for counselling.

Then again, even if it is proved that a teacher is indeed guilty, who decides the degree of his penalty? One cannot discount the fact that the politicization of education in West Bengal, as politicization of many other aspects of public life, may reduce the teacher?s penalty to a perfunctory one, notwithstanding the physical and psychological damage that he has inflicted upon his student. Perhaps the angry guardians in Midnapore anticipated as much and refused to let the school function until the guilty teacher was punished. Interestingly, the teacher in question is a Trinamool Congress functionary and former pradhan of the local panchayat.

One has heard that a code of conduct exists in schools at the primary and secondary levels. But such a code is restricted only to the state-aided schools. Private schools presumably have their own private codes of conduct. When the picture is so lopsided and there are so many loopholes in the system, the directorate of school education ought to work its way towards widening the scope of the ban if it is serious about eliminating the causes of psychological trauma on the students. More important, it could perhaps take a cue from Jharkhand, where a tribunal will be set up in order to deal with corporal punishment and monitoring schools. What is novel about the Jharkhand government?s plans is that it has decided to first conduct a sample survey in government schools to get the real picture and determine the intensity of corporal punishment in schools. The tribunal will play another important role ? it will monitor the fees charged by public schools so that they do not become excessive, and hear the grievances of the teaching community.

A new area has been opened up for discussion by a new phenomenon. Of late, there have been a few incidents of students beating up their teachers. Such actions are just as likely to stem from extreme indiscipline and politicization, as from anger and lack of respect for the teaching community. The directorate of school education, while supervising the proper implementation of the ban, has another task in hand. It must also find a way to deal with this new twist to the corporal punishment tale.