I will not go to that school again, says girl

“I will not to go to that school again. I am scared that the warden may ask me to do it again,” the class V student of Patha Bhavan at Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan, who was asked to drink her own urine as punishment for bedwetting, told The Hindu over telephone on Tuesday.

Three days have passed since the incident and the 10-year-old is yet to get over her trauma.

She is terrified and her family members are considering admitting her in some other school, said her mother Poonam Mistry.

“She starts trembling with fear when someone asks whether she wants to get back to the school. She says that other students will laugh at her and she might be subjected to the same treatment again. She even refuses food,” Ms. Mistry said.

“The university authorities are saying that the warden acted out of a superstition. How can superstitions be allowed in an educational institution,” she asked.

Ms. Mistry said the family was forced to pull out the child from the hostel when she was heard crying over the telephone. “When we asked the warden, she said she had made the child lick her urine from the mattress after she found her guilty of bedwetting. It was so shameful and infuriating that we could not wait till the next morning to get her out,” she said. Ms. Mistry claimed that her daughter had told her that the warden used to threaten children.

The University has sent a report on the incident to the Ministry of Human Resource Development, which will forward it to the Prime Minister’s Office. The PMO has sought a report from the Ministry as the Prime Minister is the chancellor of Visva Bharati.