A Kerala High Court ruling from February 2026 cleared a teacher who struck a child with a cane, calling it "minimum corporal punishment" and not a crime. That verdict deserves a direct challenge.
On February 3, 2026, Justice C. Pratheep Kumar of the Kerala High Court quashed the criminal case against Sibin S.V., a 36-year-old teacher at VPS Malankara School in Venganoor, Thiruvananthapuram, who had struck a student on the buttocks with a cane inside the school staff room. The court's reasoning: the force was minimal, the intention was corrective, and therefore no offence had been committed under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita or the Juvenile Justice Act. A cane, the judgment noted, is a "traditional instrument of school discipline" rather than a lethal weapon.
That framing is worth sitting with for a moment. When a court defines a stick used to hit a child as a traditional instrument and not a weapon, it is not making a narrow legal finding. It is sending a message to every teacher, principal, and parent in Kerala about where the boundaries of acceptable behaviour lie. And that message is badly wrong.
India's Right to Education Act is unambiguous. Article 17 prohibits physical punishment and mental harassment of children in schools, full stop. There is no clause for "minimum force" or "bona fide corrective intent." The law was written that way for a reason. Research cited by IndiaSpend found that 80 percent of marginalised children in Indian schools have experienced corporal punishment, and a Childline India Foundation study across 198 schools in 11 states between 2009 and 2011 found physical punishment present in nearly 95 percent of them, despite the national ban. The problem is not a shortage of legislation. It is a shortage of enforcement, and courts that carve out exceptions make that worse.
The psychological evidence is not ambiguous either. Peer-reviewed research published in journals indexed by the National Institutes of Health links school violence, including caning and hitting, to post-traumatic stress disorder, reactive attachment disorder, desensitisation to violence, and increased likelihood that the child becomes a violent adult. A child hit in a staff room at age seven does not register it as "minimum force." They register it as an adult with authority over them deciding that their body is available for punishment. That is the lesson being taught, and it sticks.
The Venganoor incident is not exceptional. That is precisely the problem. The teacher was prosecuted, the case reached the high court, and the court sent him home without consequence. What signal does that send to the thousands of teachers across Kerala who do the same thing every week without anyone filing a case at all? The court's ruling essentially narrows the path to accountability even further: only "sadistic" beatings with clear malicious intent will now attract criminal liability. Everything below that threshold is classified as discipline.
Kerala's education minister and the state government need to respond to this ruling publicly and clearly. A court decision does not override the RTE Act, and the state has both the authority and the obligation to issue an unambiguous directive to school administrators: the law banning corporal punishment applies in every classroom, every staff room, and every corridor, regardless of what a single high court bench decided about one cane in one case. The silence from Thiruvananthapuram is itself a position.
Frankly, the argument that physical punishment works is also just factually wrong. Research consistently shows that nonviolent, positive discipline produces better academic outcomes and healthier classroom environments. Countries that removed corporal punishment from schools, including the entire European Union, New Zealand, and most of South America, did not descend into chaos. Children learned just as well, and in many cases better, once fear was removed from the equation. The idea that a child cannot be taught without the threat of being hit belongs to a different century.
There is a direct accountability question here that goes beyond the court. Primary school teachers in Kerala who strike children with sticks are the ones committing a wrong, not the six- or seven-year-olds who misspell a word or fail to recite a table. The child who makes a mistake while learning is doing exactly what a child is supposed to do. The adult who responds with a cane is failing at the most basic definition of a teacher's job. Those teachers should face departmental action. Schools that permit it should lose accreditation. The education system cannot keep treating children's physical safety as a second-order concern behind administrative inconvenience.
The Kerala High Court's February ruling will not be the last word on this. Child rights organisations including those that brought the Childline study to light have pushed back against the "reasonable force" standard for years. The Supreme Court of India has repeatedly affirmed that children have the right to dignity and protection from harm. What's needed now is not another court ruling but a government willing to enforce the law it already has, starting with clear guidance that no version of hitting a child with a stick will be treated as education.
Also read: The EU has joined Pax Silica and the global AI chip map just changed permanently • The Bank of England just rewrote the rules on stablecoins and the $53 billion ceiling is only the beginning • Berlin drone startup Stark is raising €300 million after failing every military strike test eight months ago