Sreelatha Menon: Giving Shanno a piece of the sky

The death of a girl due to alleged corporal punishment spurs a law firm to start a drive to bridge the divide between government and private schools

Even the worst possible scenarios offer redeeming features that keep alive human hope. Shanno, the 11-year-old girl in a municipal corporation school in New Delhi who died after a teacher allegedly made her squat in the sun with bricks on her back, did not create much of media uproar. Even the local government did not jump into action. But a corporate law firm, Kochhar and Co, whose client list includes over 50 Fortune 500 companies, decided to take up her case. The findings mentioned in her father’s petition to the Delhi High Court and the arguments of her lawyer, Rohit Kochhar, are as shocking as her death. These cite instances of social apartheid by well-to-do teachers against children from slums, with the former often covering their noses while entering the classes and treating the children with taunts and jibes.

Kochhar says he has two daughters aged two and five and he was able to see them in Shanno. He was shocked enough by the incident to take up Shanno’s case. Last week, he launched the Kochhar Shanno Foundation against corporal punishment in schools as part of his company’s corporate social responsibility initiative. He says his dream is to see an equal world for India’s children. His foundation, he says, will look beyond corporal punishment at bridging the social divide and improving the sensibility of teachers in government schools.

Kochhar was approached with Shanno’s case by one of his client firms which knew the workers of an NGO working in the Bawana area, where Shanno’s family lives. He decided to take up the case in the High Court.

The foundation is set to talk to the new Minister for Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, Kumari Selja, to create a package for slum-dwellers to empower them.

Kochhar is also planning to informally adopt some municipal-run schools, including the one where Shanno studied, to improve them in such a way that they are on a par with private schools. He asks how many graduates from IITs or IIMs or IAS officers are from government schools? He feels the government schools need support from the private sector and NGOs to bridge the quality divide.

This is something some others like the Azim Premji Foundation are already doing. As for the social divide, he feels that poverty alleviation programmes have to be devised to provide facilities in the slums.

Parth Shah of the Centre for Civil Society looks at it another way. He feels sending children to private schools could pressure the government schools to perform. He says a voucher of Rs 800 to every child should see to it that the student is empowered.

Kochhar feels private schools also have layers of quality parallel to the layers of social classes. Hence, improving the government schools should be the solution. The pending Right to Free Education Bill is awaiting the attention of the new Human Resources Development Minister Kapil Sibal and is expected to bring in a few corrections in the way children are taught in the country. Vouchers may come in and the private sector will get a wider room as a provider of education. If these give the Shannos of this country a piece of the sky, it will not matter whether the providers are government teachers, private teachers or the thousands of unsung tuition masters who fill in for the inefficiency of private schools.