The tragic incident has brought into sharp focus the fast deteriorating student-teacher relationship in India. Cases of teacher brutality have been on an alarming rise in recent years. A 12-year-old boy lost part of his vision when his master threw a duster at him in New Delhi. A class 10 student committed suicide in Chennai after his teacher stripped and trashed him. In Udaipur, a class 12 boy died after being beaten by his master for having sat with his legs on the table. A 11-year-old student succumbed to sun stroke after being made to stand on the school ground in New Delhi’s scorching summer. Examples can be endless.

On the other end of the spectrum are the boys and even girls who harass and disgrace their teachers. A teacher of chemistry writing on a blackboard had a trying time in a class of 60 adolescent boys, who kept darting paper rockets at him. And when the master said he knew who the mischief-maker was, the boys asked him in a chorus whether the man had eyes at his back. There are also incidents of boys and girls from rich families who walk around with a terrible attitude: they think that teachers get their salaries from the fees the students pay. In a country, where the school staff is ill-paid, this economic disparity between the teacher and the taught often places the classroom relationship at an uneven and uncomfortable level. The well-to-do students, invariably pampered and spoilt by their parents, never let their teachers forget that they are obliged to the money that comes in as fees.

Gone are the days, it seems, when teachers were great friends of their students. Yes, but, of course, outside the class. In a southern Indian town of the 1930s, teachers and students played games together and chased each other on the banks of the river there. But come the next morning, the teacher-student respect and decorum remained intact in class. Even in the 1960s and the 1970s, students held their teachers in awe and seldom disobeyed or disregarded them.

However, with the dawn of the internet age and the phenomenal growth of the new rich, equations began to change. Boys and girls felt that they could pick up a whole lot of information from internet sites, callously ignoring the fact that it can also be grossly incorrect and misleading. Also, students in most elite schools growing up in the lap of luxury and with few wants began to think that the teacher was at best a nuisance, a poor man who could not afford to live in an upmarket locality or wear designer clothes or own fancy cars. Imagine, a 20-year-old student going to college in Chennai in a Rs 1000000 (USD 25000) car, which may well be equivalent to his professor’s total annual salary! Imagine a 10-year old coming to school with an expensive mobile phone, whose price may well be that of his teacher’s whole month wage!

Added to this, nuclear families with a child or two are unduly protective of their sons and daughters. They could do no wrong. If there was a problem at school, the teacher was to blame. The parents of a fifth grader complained to the principal when a teacher casually commented on the student’s strange hair style. Often parents ignore their children’s disobedience and arrogance. Walking habitually late to school and flaunting expensive gadgets are considered a child’s right, but parents who encourage these forget that school is a democratic space and the last place to expose one’s affluence. Egalitarianism must be the keyword on the school or college campus.

Yet, corporal punishment is not to be condoned. This is surely not the answer to get children on to the right track. Apart from the fact that physical and mental abuse is banned by Indian law, the stick tends to push the child into a state of rebelliousness. Anger and frustration build in a child that is ridiculed or beaten, and these can lead to low self-esteem and suicidal tendencies. Or, at times, murderous intentions. The mother, the grandmother and the sister of a young Ayurvedic physician I knew in Bihar were butchered to death by a few school students because his schoolteacher father had got them suspended for habitual notoriety.

Obviously, teachers have an enormous task on hand, and they appear ill-equipped to handle it. Modern boys and girls have many problems to cope with at home: working parents who have little time for their children, fractured families, broken homes and parental expectation that run unreasonably high. With social networking sites galore, youngsters chat, but no longer talk. Fathers and mothers are too tired at the end of the day to initiate a conversation with their children.