Dalit, Adivasi, rural and economically disadvantaged communities have repeatedly raised these concerns, often from the sharpest end of the crisis. For children in remote villages and tribal settlements, the loss of a neighbourhood school can mean a long and unsafe journey to another village. For students in government and municipal schools, a vacant teacher’s post can mean months or years without instruction in crucial subjects. For children living in government hostels and Ashram schools, inadequate sanitation, food, security and medical facilities can turn access to education into a question of basic safety and dignity. Moreover, for families seeking education in Marathi, the steady weakening of Marathi-medium institutions raises questions about whether the State is preserving meaningful choice or allowing an entire public education network to wither.

The Maharashtra media and even some sections of the “national legacy media” have reported these failures repeatedly, but largely as separate episodes: a school without teachers here, a dangerous building there, a protest over toilets or hostels elsewhere, a proposed school merger or closure, a dispute over Marathi-medium education, or a new policy promising modernisation. The result has been a fragmented public conversation about what is, in reality, a connected and longstanding crisis. These issues crucial to access and participation in a democracy have never been the subject of a sustained media campaign. Successive governments have announced schemes, reviews, reforms and infrastructure programmes, while the underlying questions of staffing, access, funding and accountability have remained.

What is equally striking is how little political space this crisis has occupied as a sustained issue. Despite Maharashtra’s large network of government, Zilla Parishad and municipal schools, and despite repeated concerns raised by teachers, parents, educationists and marginalised communities, the condition of public schooling has rarely been made a central political question. Opposition parties have criticised individual decisions, school closures or government policies, but the broader deterioration of the public education system has not consistently been treated as a major political issue.

It was against this backdrop that the recent School Thik Karo campaign brought the condition of government schools into a more concentrated public spotlight. The campaign led by Cockroach Janta Party convenor Abhijeet Dipke has sought to document basic deficiencies in schools across Maharashtra and place them before the public. Its significance lies in something larger: it has attempted to connect problems that have too often been reported, protested and debated separately. The crisis, however, predates the campaign by years.

The evidence is now difficult to dismiss as a series of isolated incidents. Maharashtra’s own education data records schools without electricity, internet connectivity, functional computers, accessible toilets and adequate teaching staff. Students have protested because teachers are missing. Adivasi students have gone on hunger strike over hostel conditions. Parents and activists have opposed school closures, mergers and relocations. Marathi-medium schools have steadily declined. Teachers are being pulled away from classrooms for non-academic duties, including prolonged election-related work. At the same time, governments have explored cluster schools, school adoption and Public-Private Partnership models even as large parts of the public system continue to struggle with basic infrastructure and vacancies.

This is therefore not simply a story about a few poorly maintained schools, nor is it only about the latest government policy or the latest student protest. It is a story about what happens when the State’s responsibility to provide public education is repeatedly addressed through piecemeal interventions while the structural weaknesses of the system remain.

Maharashtra now speaks the language of a “modern”, digital and future-ready education system. However, before asking whether its schools are ready for artificial intelligence, coding, smart classrooms and digital learning, there is a more basic question to answer: are its schools adequately staffed, safely accessible, properly equipped and capable of providing every child with a meaningful education? The answer emerging from the experiences of students, teachers, parents, marginalised communities and the State’s own data is far more troubling than the language of modernisation suggests.

Justice Varale questions education spending as Marathi-medium schools face closure

Nothing exposes Maharashtra state’s education policy priorities more than what was highlighted by a Supreme Court Judge recently.

Speaking about the condition of Marathi-medium schools weeks ago, Supreme Court Justice P.B. Varale on Saturday, August 22, reportedly questioned the State’s spending priorities, saying that even a fraction of the funds earmarked for the Nashik Kumbh Mela could have helped prevent the closure of hundreds of Marathi-medium schools. The Times of India reported that Justice Varale made the remarks during an event at his former school in Nashik.

Justice Varale reportedly referred to the Maharashtra government’s proposed expenditure on Kumbh infrastructure and a corridor project, while clarifying that he did not oppose such spending. However, he questioned whether a small portion of the allocation could instead have been directed towards education. He said that 0.1% of the Kumbh allocation, amounting to around Rupees 32 Crore, could have helped save more than 100–150 Marathi-medium schools from closure, according to the report.

The Maharashtra government has informed the Union government that a comprehensive development plan of Rupees 22,425.39 Crore has been approved for the 2027 Nashik Simhastha Kumbh Mela. The plan was approved at a meeting of the Apex Committee chaired by the Chief Minister on March 13, 2026, with the Kumbh scheduled to begin in October 2026.

Justice Varale also drew attention to the condition of residential schools, particularly ashramshalas catering to students from marginalised communities. Referring to reports of three girl students at an ashramshala who died after allegedly being bitten by snakes while sleeping on the floor, he reportedly said that the overall condition of several residential schools remained “pathetic”.

His remarks also pointed to a broader concern over the State’s changing budgetary priorities. Justice Varale reportedly observed that the share of the budget allocated to education, which had earlier ranged between 8% and 12%, had declined.

Modern education system cannot be built on disappearing schools

Perhaps the most significant development in Maharashtra’s education story is that students and their families are increasingly refusing to remain passive recipients of policy. Adivasi students have gone on hunger strike, Dharashiv students have sat outside the Zilla Parishad CEO’s office, villagers have locked a school in protest over teacher shortages, parents have challenged school relocations, and activists have documented failures in school infrastructure.

The protests differ in geography and immediate demand, but they share a common message: children and their families are being asked to accept gaps in a system that the State continues to describe as modern, inclusive and future-ready. Educationist Prabhu Mohapatra, commenting on the wider rise in student protests, told PTI that students were increasingly asserting themselves as stakeholders in education policy and that the protests reflected concerns over infrastructure, teacher availability and the quality of learning.

That assertion of agency may be the most important shift in Maharashtra’s education story. Students are not demanding luxury. They are demanding teachers, safe school buildings, functioning toilets, drinking water, adequate classrooms, accessible schools and the ability to continue learning in their own language. They are asking for the basic conditions necessary for education, and for the State to treat those conditions not as discretionary benefits but as public obligations. Maharashtra now has two competing narratives about education.

The first is the official narrative: smart classrooms, artificial intelligence, coding, digital platforms, teacher training, modernisation and a “mission mode” transformation of the education system. The second is emerging from classrooms, villages, hostels and protests: missing teachers, inadequate infrastructure, unsafe or unsuitable accommodation, inaccessible schools, unreliable or disputed data, and institutions facing closure or merger. Both realities have to be confronted.

The government can legitimately point to improvements and new initiatives, and its officials have disputed some of the broader allegations concerning infrastructure. But the State’s own U-DISE data, the Centre’s Project Approval Board review, the Bombay High Court’s intervention and repeated student and parent protests point to structural weaknesses that cannot be resolved through announcements alone.

The decline of Marathi-medium schools makes the problem even more consequential. This is not simply an infrastructure crisis; it is also a question of what kind of public education Maharashtra intends to preserve. If Marathi is to be protected, Marathi-medium schools cannot merely be celebrated symbolically. They must be adequately funded, staffed, upgraded and made capable of providing quality education without forcing parents to abandon the language in which their children have been studying.

If a school has low enrolment, the first question should therefore not automatically be how soon it can be closed. The more fundamental question is why enrolment is falling in the first place.

Is the school inadequately staffed? Are its buildings and facilities deteriorating? Are teachers being diverted to non-teaching duties? Is the school too far from where families now live? Has urban redevelopment displaced the community it once served? Are parents choosing other schools because the Marathi-medium option is perceived to offer poorer infrastructure or fewer opportunities? Has the medium of instruction itself become stigmatised? In addition, crucially, could targeted investment reverse the decline?

These questions become particularly urgent when the children affected are poor, rural, tribal or dependent on Marathi-medium government schools. For such families, the closure of a neighbourhood school is not simply an administrative restructuring. It can mean longer journeys, additional transport costs, greater dependence on private education and, in some cases, the eventual withdrawal of children from school altogether. And where closure is genuinely unavoidable, the State must be able to answer a more basic question: where exactly will every child go?

The Maharashtra government has now promised a time-bound transformation of the education system. The measure of that transformation, however, should not be the number of schemes announced, platforms launched, classrooms labelled “smart” or meetings conducted. It should be visible in the ordinary conditions in which children actually study.

It should mean a functioning fan in a classroom, a usable toilet, clean drinking water, adequate teachers, a safe hostel, a working computer, a laboratory that has actually been built and equipped, and a school that remains within reasonable reach of the children it serves. It should also mean a Marathi-medium school that is not forced to fight simply to survive.

Until these become ordinary features rather than exceptional achievements, the phrase “modern education system” will remain more aspiration than reality. A State cannot credibly claim to be building the schools of the future while allowing existing schools to become inaccessible, under-resourced or disappear altogether.

August 2026: Students on hunger strike for the right to study

The latest and perhaps most revealing episode came from Maharashtra’s Adivasi student community. In August 2026, tribal students in Pune and elsewhere in Maharashtra began protesting against a range of issues concerning government hostels and Ashram schools. Six students continued a hunger strike at the Adivasi Government Boys Hostel near the Hadapsar-Manjari border.

The immediate trigger was a Government Resolution issued on August 14, 2026, imposing a maximum age of 30 years for admission to tribal hostels. But the students’ demands went far beyond the age restriction.

The protest also brought allegations about the treatment of female students into focus. On August 24, Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi wrote to Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis raising concerns about the conditions described to him by tribal students. He alleged that hostels were unsafe and lacked adequate food, sanitation and medical care, and referred to claims that female students returning after an extended absence were subjected to pregnancy and other medical tests.

The Hindu also reported on August 24, the protesting students demanded the withdrawal of the August 14 Government Resolution and a revised order based on the earlier November 11, 2011 framework, with allowances linked to inflation. They sought greater protection for students living in tribal hostels and Ashram schools, ₹1 crore insurance cover for tribal students, ₹1 crore compensation for the families of three tribal girls who died following a snake-bite incident in Gadchiroli, a safe and properly equipped hostel for female students in Pune, and immediate filling of vacant posts including peons, security guards and sanitation workers.

The scale of dependence on these hostels is itself significant. As The Indian Express reported on August 26, the Tribal Development Department runs 490 government hostels across Maharashtra, accommodating between 58,000 and 60,000 students every year. The government ultimately backed down on the immediate issue. On August 25, following discussions with tribal legislators and MPs, Tribal Development Minister Ashok Uike announced that the 30-year age limit had been scrapped and that there would be no age restriction for admission to Adivasi hostels. The Indian Express reported that the decision came a day after Rahul Gandhi had raised the matter with Fadnavis. The government therefore acted. However, it acted after 13 days of hunger strike.

That sequence matters. It raises the question of how many of the other problems raised by the students — safety, sanitation, staffing, food, medical care and financial support — will require another protest before they receive sustained attention.

July 2026: “We need teachers, not promises”

The same pattern was visible in Dharashiv. On July 31, India Today reported that Class 10 students of a Zilla Parishad secondary school in Sonari village had begun an indefinite sit-in outside the Zilla Parishad Chief Executive Officer’s office demanding regular secondary-school teachers. Their complaint was not new. According to the protesting students, several teaching and staff posts had remained vacant for nearly four years. Repeated representations had allegedly failed to produce concrete action. A day before the sit-in, villagers had locked the school to draw attention to the shortage.

Students particularly objected to primary-school teachers being used to teach secondary classes, arguing that students preparing for the SSC examination required qualified subject teachers. The protest carried an especially pointed message. Students invoked the government’s “Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao” campaign and asked, in effect: what does saving the girl child mean if she is then denied the teachers required to complete her education? They also invoked Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s call to “Educate, Organise and Agitate”.

They said they had already approached the Zilla Parishad CEO, Education Officer, District Collector and Superintendent of Police on July 28, but claimed that no effective action followed.

This is not merely a question of staffing. For a Class 10 student, a missing teacher is not an abstract administrative vacancy. It can mean an incomplete syllabus, inadequate preparation for a board examination and, for poorer families, pressure to pay for private tuition that they may not be able to afford. Moreover, the state already knows that teacher shortages are a wider problem.

The Government’s own data exposes the gap

On July 17, the findings emerging from the Ministry of Education’s U-DISE 2025-26 data provided that Maharashtra had 108,139 schools, 21.6 million students and 750,272 teachers. But 3,201 schools had no electricity connection at all. Another 10,938 had electricity connections that were not functional. A further 23,855 schools had no internet connectivity. Of the 90,419 schools that had computer facilities, computers were functional in only 84,530. That left 23,609 schools without operational computer systems.

The contradiction is hard to miss. The state is speaking increasingly about artificial intelligence, coding, smart classrooms and digital learning. Yet thousands of its schools are still struggling with the infrastructure required to switch on a computer, let alone build a digital classroom. The problem goes beyond technology. U-DISE data showed that 9,269 schools were single-teacher schools, catering to 179,104 students. More than 32,000 schools lacked separate toilets for children with disabilities, while 16,341 did not have ramps with railings.

There were 2,019 unusable girls’ toilets and 3,280 unusable boys’ toilets, with the data attributing the problem to issues including water, maintenance and pending repairs. Another 3,932 schools lacked playgrounds and 1,099 lacked a library or book bank. Only 13,550 schools had digital libraries, leaving 94,589 without one. These figures matter because they are not merely the claims of opposition parties or activists; they come from the government’s own education database.

Teachers are being asked to do more with less

Teachers have also described the consequences of this system. Vijay Kombe, president of the Maharashtra State Primary Teachers’ Committee, told ETV Bharat that schools continued to face shortages of basic items such as mats, desks and benches. He said local-government schools lacked dedicated cleaning staff and that teachers in some places were consequently forced to clean classrooms and toilets, sometimes with students’ help.

Kombe also claimed that more than 75 per cent of primary schools run by local self-government bodies lacked headmasters, leaving teachers to combine administrative duties with classroom teaching. He criticised the staffing arrangement in low-enrolment schools, under which one primary teacher may have to manage multiple classes, while one teacher may be required to teach all subjects for Classes 6 to 8.

There is, however, an important official counterpoint. Divisional Deputy Director of Education Rajesh Kankal said drinking-water facilities were available in more than 100,000 schools, while more than 107,000 had hand-washing facilities and more than 102,000 conducted annual health check-ups. He said the administration was working to rectify the remaining shortcomings. The issue, therefore, is not that Maharashtra has no facilities.

It is that the existence of facilities in the majority of schools does not erase the thousands of schools where they are absent, dysfunctional or inaccessible. For a child attending one of those schools, the state-wide average offers little comfort.

SIR extension keeps teachers away from classrooms

The extension of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Maharashtra has prolonged the deployment of teachers as Booth Level Officers (BLOs) and support staff, affecting regular classroom teaching, unit tests and other academic activities. Teachers who were expected to return to schools by August 8 had been assigned election-related duties until August 17, with house visits, voter verification and form-related work continuing even as schools prepare for examinations and work to complete the syllabus.

The timing has added to existing pressures on schools. Unit tests scheduled for August and periodic assessments meant to track students’ learning are being affected, while teachers are also required to cover new textbooks introduced for Standards III, IV and VI under the National Education Policy. In some government and civic schools, more than 70% of teaching staff has reportedly been deployed for SIR-related work, leaving schools with reduced staff and, in some cases, forcing them to operate for only half the day. Teachers and school heads have said the prolonged absence is making it difficult to complete teaching and conduct examinations as scheduled.

The impact extends beyond teachers formally appointed as BLOs, with other teaching and non-teaching employees being assigned to assist with the exercise. In one school, Headmaster Tanaji Mane said three teachers initially appointed as BLOs were later joined by teaching and non-teaching staff who were relieved of their regular duties. Data cited by Progressive Teachers Association president Tanaji Kamble from Mumbai’s Ghatkopar East constituency reportedly showed that 184 of 283 BLOs were from the Education Department, including 157 teachers. Teachers have also faced pressure to report for election duties, with police notices reportedly issued to some who failed to do so. Educationists and teacher representatives have consequently questioned whether such prolonged deployment is compatible with the State’s responsibility to ensure uninterrupted schooling.

The issue ultimately raises a larger question about how election-related administrative work is being balanced against children’s right to regular education. Teachers have described the SIR process as continuous and demanding, while educationists have warned that prolonged absence from classrooms can disrupt learning, assessments and syllabus completion. With the electoral exercise continuing even as the academic year progresses, teacher organisations have suggested using trained personnel from other departments or other mechanisms for election work instead of repeatedly drawing teachers away from schools. The concern is not simply about teachers’ workload, but about what happens to students when the people responsible for teaching them are routinely pulled away from the classroom.

Detailed report may be read here.

The Centre’s review makes the picture worse

The Ministry of Education’s Project Approval Board raised similar concerns while examining Maharashtra’s Samagra Shiksha plan for 2026-27. Of 22,416 eligible upper-primary, secondary and higher-secondary schools, 21,009 did not have ICT laboratories. Another 4,286 lacked smart classrooms. Nearly 60 per cent of primary and upper-primary schools had fewer than 30 students each, while 7,186 schools had only one teacher.

The Union also noted that more than 4,300 villages did not have a secondary school within the prescribed distance and more than 6,500 villages lacked access to a higher-secondary school. More than 80 per cent of approved science laboratories had not been completed, while toilets sanctioned for children with special needs remained pending. The teacher vacancy figures were equally concerning; around 17% of secondary teaching posts and 25% of higher-secondary posts were vacant.

The Centre approved ₹2,494.17 crore under Samagra Shiksha for Maharashtra for 2026-27 and directed the state to complete pending infrastructure and digital projects in “mission mode”. The Maharashtra government, for its part, said most sanctioned ICT laboratories were under installation and would be completed by the end of the year.

But this creates an uncomfortable policy contradiction. The government is being asked to modernise schools while it has not yet completed the basics.

Then there is the question of closing schools

Perhaps the most consequential issue is not what is missing from schools, but what happens when the state decides a school is no longer viable. In April 2026, the Maharashtra government issued two Government Resolutions declaring 433 primary schools and 324 secondary schools ineligible for grant-in-aid. The schools were directed to apply under the Maharashtra Self-Financed Schools Act, 2012. If they failed to do so, their recognition could be cancelled, effectively leading to closure. The Bombay High Court intervened.

On April 29, 2026, the Kolhapur Bench held that the government’s action could not proceed against the petitioner schools without giving them an opportunity to be heard. As The Hindu reported on May 19, the court found that the resolutions violated principles of natural justice and directed that the petitioner institutions be removed from the list. Nevertheless, the court’s observations went beyond procedure.

The bench noted that the affected schools were predominantly Marathi-medium institutions, particularly in villages. It pointed out the contradiction in the state’s position: on the one hand, Maharashtra was insisting that Marathi be given greater importance; on the other, the government’s action could result in the closure of Marathi-medium schools.

The judges also asked questions that should have been at the centre of the government’s decision before the resolutions were issued: Could the students actually be accommodated in nearby schools? Would the medium of instruction continue? What would happen in villages where alternative schools were not available? What would happen to teaching and non-teaching staff? Could teachers be absorbed elsewhere? And could poor families be expected to bear the consequences of the shift to self-financed education?

The court concluded that these considerations had not been adequately addressed and directed the state to conduct hearings before taking action. That intervention is crucial because it exposes the danger of treating school closure as a mere question of numbers. A school with fewer students is not automatically a redundant school as it may be the only school within walking distance, or the only affordable school, or the only school teaching in the child’s language. And if it disappears, the state’s responsibility does not disappear with it.

2023: From school closures to “adoption”: A changing model of public education

The debate over low-enrolment schools cannot be separated from another policy shift: the growing role being given to private entities in the management and development of government schools. Maharashtra has increasingly presented private participation as a means of improving infrastructure and educational quality, even as questions remain about why the State is unable to adequately fund and maintain its own public-school system.

In September 2023, the Maharashtra government introduced an “Adopt a School” scheme under the National Education Policy’s Vidyanjali initiative. As reported by the Times of India on September 19, 2023, the scheme allowed private and public sector entities to adopt government schools for five or 10 years. The State proposed making more than 62,000 government schools available for adoption. Corporate entities could use Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) funds for activities ranging from repairs, maintenance and painting to improving sanitation, health, enrolment and the use of technology.

Dalit groups strongly protested this move towards privatisation that would deny access to Dalit, Adivasi and OBC students especially in rural areas.

The financial commitments were substantial yet no audit of the scheme or the implementation have ever been held, nor demanded. According to the government resolution reported by The Times of India, entities adopting schools in “A” and “B” category municipal corporations, including Mumbai and Pune, were required to commit ₹2 crore for five years or ₹3 crore for 10 years. For “C” category municipal corporations, the amounts were ₹1 crore and ₹2 crore respectively, while other schools could be adopted for ₹50 lakh for five years or ₹1 crore for 10 years. The Business Standard, reporting on September 18, 2023, said the funds could be used for school-building repairs, painting, and toilets, infrastructure and sports equipment.

The government insisted that the scheme was not privatisation. In December 2023, then School Education Minister Deepak Kesarkar told the Hindustan Times that a major corporate house had expressed interest in adopting around 5,000 schools and stressed that the objective was to improve infrastructure and amenities, not to privatise schools. The government resolution also permitted an adopting entity to add its name to the existing school name for the duration of the agreement, although the original name was to be retained.

The distinction between “adoption” and privatisation, however, becomes more complicated when viewed alongside the State’s broader education policy. In July 2026, Frontline reported that Maharashtra was expanding public-private partnership models in school education, including the operation of five English-medium schools of the Pune Municipal Corporation through a PPP arrangement. The report said the same organisation that had previously operated the schools using CSR funds was subsequently awarded a contract worth ₹12 crore annually by the Pune civic administration. Frontline also reported concerns over proposals to hand over land reserved for Mumbai municipal schools to private entities under PPP arrangements.

This raises a fundamental question about the direction of public education. If private organisations are initially invited to improve government schools through CSR and are later given contracts to operate schools using public funds, the State’s role can gradually shift from being the primary provider of education to financing or facilitating private participation in its delivery. The issue is therefore not simply whether private money can improve a school building. It is who ultimately controls public educational assets, who determines priorities and whether access to education remains governed primarily by public obligations rather than the interests or capacities of private partners.

The question becomes particularly important in the context of Maharashtra’s low-enrolment and cluster-school policies. In September 2023, Mid-Day reported that the State had identified 14,783 schools with 20 or fewer students for consolidation into cluster schools. The proposed restructuring was expected to affect 1,85,467 students and 29,707 teachers. The government argued that very small schools could not provide adequate infrastructure, qualified teachers or opportunities for social interaction, and pointed to successful cluster models in Panshet and Toranmal.

Teachers and education activists, however, warned that consolidation could push students to travel longer distances and increase the risk of dropouts, particularly in rural and remote areas. Their concern was especially significant for young children, girls and students from economically weaker families for whom daily travel to a distant school may itself become a barrier to attendance.

The State subsequently sought to reassure critics. In July 2025, Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde told the Maharashtra legislature, as reported by ET Education, that schools would not be closed merely because of low enrolment. He said the government would make adjustments to ensure that such schools continued functioning and that teachers would be redeployed only after appropriate adjustments were made. Yet the same report noted that around 18,000 schools had fewer than 20 students.

The policy trajectory therefore remains difficult to reconcile. On one side, the government says low-enrolment schools will not be shut and that every child must continue to have access to education. On the other, cluster models, school consolidation and private participation are being promoted as solutions to the perceived financial and infrastructural limitations of the existing public-school network.

The issue is not that private participation is inherently harmful, nor that every small school must necessarily remain open regardless of circumstances. The concern is whether the State is addressing the reasons behind low enrolment and poor infrastructure before declaring a school inefficient, relocating its students or inviting private entities to take over functions that should ordinarily be part of public educational provision.

A government school is not merely a building that can be repaired through CSR funding or managed through a contractual arrangement. It is part of the public infrastructure through which the State fulfils its constitutional obligation to provide education. When schools are under-resourced, the answer cannot automatically be to reduce the State’s responsibility by transferring greater functions to private actors. The more important question is whether Maharashtra is investing sufficiently in making its public schools viable before concluding that they need to be consolidated, adopted or operated through PPP models.

Marathi schools: Declining enrolment or a policy-created cycle?

The decline of Marathi-medium education in Maharashtra is particularly troubling because it cannot simply be reduced to a story of parents “choosing English”. The numbers in Mumbai are stark. According to BMC data cited by ThePrint on July 24, 2025, the number of Marathi-medium schools in Mumbai fell from 460 in 2019-20 to 421 in 2025-26 — a loss of 39 schools. Around 50,000 students had moved elsewhere from the 2019-20 academic session onwards.

The longer-term numbers are even more striking. Mid-Day, reporting on May 4, 2025, said Mumbai had 413 Marathi-medium schools in 2010-11, 368 in 2014-15 and only 262 by 2023-24. That is not a temporary fluctuation, but rather a sustained decline.

The government has attributed the decline largely to parental preference for English-medium education. Parents do indeed have reasons to make that choice. English is widely perceived as providing better access to higher education, employment and social mobility. But educators and activists argue that parents are also responding to the relative quality and visibility of the schools being offered to them. As ThePrint reported in July 2025, educators pointed to inadequate infrastructure in Marathi-medium schools and alleged that English-medium institutions received greater preference when it came to development.

Deepak Pawar of the School Education Action Coordination Committee argued that Marathi-medium schools should be upgraded without changing their medium to English. Teachers cited in the report similarly described a communication gap with middle-class families and said some Marathi-medium schools had modern facilities such as Atal Tinkering Labs and robotics labs, but that efforts to publicise and develop these came only after enrolment had already begun to collapse. The important point here is thus, if the state allows a school to deteriorate, then points to falling enrolment as evidence that the school is no longer viable, it risks creating a self-fulfilling cycle. One cannot ignore the vicious cycle of how poor infrastructure erodes parental confidence, leading to declining enrolment, reduced allocation of teachers and resources, and a further deterioration of schools, creating a cycle that ultimately pushes schools towards closure. The final closure can then be presented as the inevitable consequence of “parental preference”. But inevitability is not the same as neutrality.

The fate of one of Mumbai’s oldest Marathi schools

The uncertainty surrounding Dadar’s Nabar Guruji Vidyalaya brought this crisis into sharp relief. In May 2025, Mid-Day reported that the Marathi-medium school, which dates back to the 1940s, was facing an uncertain future amid falling admissions. Thirty-five students had appeared for its SSC examination that year, but only 17 students remained in Classes 9 and 10 for the new academic year. The management clarified that it had not decided to close the school.

Trustee Satish Rama Nayak said the institution remained financially capable of functioning because it offered free education and teachers’ salaries were supported through government grants. The difficulty was the collapse in enrolment and its impact on the teacher-student ratio. Nayak also described a social transformation.

Parents who had themselves studied in Marathi-medium schools were increasingly choosing English-medium or CBSE schools for their children, sometimes even taking loans to pay for them. That is the other side of the story. It would be too simplistic to blame the government for every parent who chooses English. But it is equally simplistic to blame parents for the disappearance of Marathi-medium schools without asking why government and aided Marathi schools have not been made equally attractive, well-equipped and aspirational.

As Sushil Shejule of the Marathi Abhyas Kendra told ThePrint, the decline had been visible for years and, despite the availability of data, neither governments nor political parties had taken meaningful action.

The irony of Marathi’s “classical language” status

In October 2024, Marathi received classical-language status from the Union government. Maharashtra has also repeatedly asserted the importance of Marathi in public life and education. The Maharashtra Compulsory Teaching and Learning of Marathi Language in Schools Act, 2020 made Marathi compulsory in schools across the state, including CBSE and ICSE schools. Yet the institutions that actually provide education through Marathi continue to shrink.

The Mid-Day report of May 2025 placed the decline against precisely this backdrop: Marathi had acquired classical-language status, but one of Mumbai’s oldest Marathi-medium schools was struggling with falling admissions. The contradiction was also noticed by the Bombay High Court in its April 2026 intervention.

The state cannot convincingly claim to protect Marathi while allowing the network of Marathi-medium schools, particularly those serving poorer and rural families, to become increasingly fragile. Protecting a language is not merely about official resolutions, signboards or declarations. It also means ensuring that a child who wants, or needs, to study in that language has a functioning school in which to do so.

Mumbai’s municipal schools: when “repair” means displacement

The infrastructure problem becomes even more complicated when schools are declared unsafe and children are moved elsewhere. In December 2025, Outlook reported on the closure and relocation of Mumbai municipal schools, including New Mahim Municipal School. Students were shifted from August 2025 to another municipal school operating from a few rooms on the first floor of a residential building.

According to the report, the replacement premises lacked a playground, proper drinking-water facilities and adequately supplied toilets. The concern raised by parents and activists was not that unsafe buildings should continue to operate. A genuinely dangerous school building cannot be defended in the name of access to education. The concern was about what children were being offered after their school was shut.

When a school has to close because its building is unsafe, the replacement should provide an equivalent educational environment. It should be sufficiently close to the children’s homes, have adequate classrooms, functional toilets and drinking-water facilities, and provide children with access to a playground. Parents and children should also have a say in decisions that directly affect their education. For Marathi-medium schools, relocation should not result in the loss of the medium of instruction. These are not peripheral concerns. They determine whether a “relocation” actually amounts to continued and meaningful access to education.

When official records themselves threaten to erase students

Another warning emerged in January 2026. On January 10, ETV Bharat reported discrepancies between Aadhaar-linked records and UDISE Plus data that had left thousands of students classified as “invalid”, “not provided”, “under verification” or “out of school”. The report said that of 2,14,68,288 students registered in the relevant Maharashtra UDISE Plus data, 5,78,433 were listed with invalid Aadhaar details and 4,98,759 had not provided Aadhaar details. Another 69,688 were shown as out of school. Educationists warned that such discrepancies could have consequences for school enrolment figures and, consequently, teacher deployment and funding. The concern was particularly acute for Marathi-medium schools.

Rajan Mahadeshwar, principal of Govandi’s Jagruti Vidyamandir, told ETV Bharat that his school had 430 students actually registered, while the UDISE system showed only 380 because 50 were marked invalid or pending verification. He feared that an artificially reduced enrolment could eventually affect the school’s viability. Officials disputed the extent of the danger.

Divisional Deputy Director Rajesh Kankal said only around five per cent of students in numerous schools did not have Aadhaar updated and said he did not expect grant-in-aid schools to face major problems. Yet the larger policy concern remains valid: when funding, staffing and school viability are increasingly linked to enrolment data, the accuracy of that data becomes an educational rights issue. A child should not become statistically invisible because a database has failed to correctly reflect their presence in a classroom.

The state is promising a transformation

The government has not remained silent. On August 22, 2026, Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde held a detailed review meeting with School Education Minister Dada Bhuse and senior officials. As Deccan Herald reported on August 23, Shinde directed the Education Department to prepare a clear, comprehensive and time-bound action plan to modernise schools and bring about “real, visible and qualitative improvements”.

The proposed plan includes teacher training, capacity building, greater involvement of education experts and experienced teachers, health check-ups, nutrition, a review of the Mid-Day Meal Scheme and attention to students’ mental and emotional well-being. The state has also expanded digital education initiatives. Digital Learning reported on August 4 that the Vinoba Digital Education platform had been expanded to 45,000 government schools across 25 districts, reaching more than 31 lakh students and nearly 1.3 lakh teachers.

These initiatives may be useful. However, the timing of the government’s August review is telling. It came after weeks in which government-school conditions had repeatedly been placed in the public eye — including through the “School Thik Karo” campaign launched in Maharashtra by Cockroach Janta Party convenor Abhijeet Dipke.

On August 15, Telangana Today reported that Dipke had launched the campaign in Hingoli after inspecting a Zilla Parishad school where he alleged that toilets lacked water, windows were broken and students lacked adequate benches. He said the campaign would document basic facilities in government schools across Maharashtra. The campaign itself is not a substitute for institutional inspection or government monitoring. Its allegations must therefore be independently verified before being treated as established facts.

But its very existence points to a troubling question: Why are political and citizen campaigns increasingly having to inspect schools to make basic educational infrastructure visible?

When will policy on public education, access and representation actually be formulated with the stakeholders? Who are the stakeholders? They are communities that demand education for the young, the most marginalised and teachers who form the other crucial arc. All the policies hurriedly formulated are however top heavy and solely the creation of bureaucrats and politicians, often concealing blatant private interests.

This is not democracy but public policy turned on its head.

Related:

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Water Cannons Instead of Answers: Bihar’s recruitment crisis and the state’s crackdown on protest

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After NEET protests ended, the battle moved online: Women protesters face threats, doxing and criminalisation

The post Maharashtra’s schools are struggling to survive as students protest, infrastructure crumbles and Marathi-medium institutions disappear appeared first on SabrangIndia.

In this conversation, activist and journalist Teesta Setalvad speaks with Rhiya Ahir, whose act of standing in front of a police van carrying detained protesters during the July 2026 student protests became one of the defining images of the movement.

Rhiya reflects on what compelled her to step forward, where courage comes from and why fear cannot become a reason for citizens to remain silent. Teesta speaks about the resolve it takes to stand up to power in difficult times.

The post ‘We Cannot Be Afraid’: Rhiya Ahir in Conversation with Teesta Setalvad appeared first on SabrangIndia.

According to his parents, Aditya was interested in joining the protest because he believed students were facing injustice. The couple decided to accompany him rather than prevent him from participating. The family travelled to Dak Bungalow Chowk by auto rickshaw and remained together during the demonstration.

Patna Police, however, have denied that the child was detained, saying he was rescued from a potentially dangerous situation at the protest site and later handed over safely to his family. The incident was reported by The Wire, which spoke to the child’s parents and the police.

Police say child was rescued

The Patna Police, in a press release issued on August 26, rejected social media claims that the child had been detained. According to the police, protesters had moved towards a restricted area and attempted to break through or remove barricades. Police said that amid the situation, they spotted a child at the protest site and intervened to protect him from the crowd and the possibility of a stampede. The police said the child was subsequently handed over to his family “safe and sound”. The family’s account differs.

Ranjit and Munni told The Wire that police first attempted to take Aditya away during the protest. According to them, media persons present at the spot intervened, following which the child was allowed to remain with them. Someone later gave Aditya a tricolour, which he began waving. When some protesters climbed onto a police bus that had reportedly been brought to detain protesters, Aditya also climbed onto the bus and continued waving the national flag. Ranjit said he subsequently took his son and attempted to leave the protest site.

According to him, police approached them and told him that his wife was waiting for him. He and Aditya followed the police and were subsequently placed in an ambulance along with Munni. The family says they were initially told they would be taken home. Instead, they were taken to the Kotwali police station, which is around 500 metres from Dak Bungalow Chowk.

Family alleges assault at police station

The parents have alleged that they were kept at the police station for several hours and assaulted by police personnel. Ranjit told The Wire that he and his wife were taken into a small room where around six police personnel were present, including four women police officers. He alleges that police personnel assaulted both him and his wife.

According to his account, officers instructed female personnel on how to beat Munni. He alleges that officers stepped on her legs and that he was beaten on the soles of his feet and hands with a baton. He also alleged that he was pushed to the ground, struck on his back and hit below the waist. Ranjit said the alleged assault lasted around 15 minutes.

“They treated us as if we were hardened criminals,” he told The Wire.

Munni separately alleged that police kicked her in the abdomen despite her having undergone a Caesarean-section delivery. Ranjit said he pleaded with the police to stop assaulting his wife.

The police have denied the allegations. Kotwali SHO Ajay Kumar told The Wire that no assault took place inside the police station. Responding to questions about injury marks on Munni’s body, he said the injuries could have been sustained during the protest itself.

Aditya kept asking about his parents

According to his father, Aditya himself was not assaulted at the police station. Ranjit said the child was offered biscuits and chocolates but refused them. Instead, he repeatedly asked to be allowed to stay with his parents. He also questioned police about why his parents had been beaten after seeing their injuries, according to Ranjit. The family says Aditya remained calm despite the situation.

His father told The Wire that the six-year-old has previously shown an interest in participating in protests. Aditya had also participated in an RJD-organised march in Patna on August 19, according to his parents.

Ranjit also claimed that Aditya’s actions during the August 25 protest had attracted police attention. According to him, police had lathi-charged protesters during the demonstration and some teacher aspirants suffered head injuries. Ranjit said Aditya asked in front of media persons who had ordered the lathi-charge. He further alleged that when a police officer was leaving the protest site, Aditya questioned him about where he was going after the alleged incident. According to Ranjit, police later asked the parents at the police station why their child had been asking about the injured protesters and the lathi-charge.

Mother taken to hospital

Munni reportedly became unwell while at the police station and complained of anxiety. Ranjit said he informed the police, who brought water for her. According to the family, she was subsequently taken to New Gardiner Road Hospital, a government hospital located around 500 metres from the police station. Munni told The Wire that two women police personnel accompanied her to the hospital.

She alleged that she was advised not to tell the doctor that she had been beaten at the police station. According to Munni, she did not tell the doctor about the alleged assault because she felt intimidated in the presence of police personnel. She was treated at the hospital and given a prescription. Munni alleges that the police took the prescription, telling her that it would later be given to her husband. She says the prescription was never returned.

The SHO denied the allegation that police had taken the prescription, saying that such a document normally remains with the patient. After her treatment, Munni was taken back to the police station. The family says they were finally released at around 8 pm and reached their home at around 9 pm.

Ranjit has further alleged that before their release, he and his wife were made to sign a written document. According to him, the document stated that strict action could be taken if Aditya participated in a protest in the future. He also claims that it stated that police could summon the parents for questioning at any time. Ranjit said he did not know the full contents of the document he had signed. The family also alleges that police instructed them not to speak about what had happened inside the police station.

Protest over TRE-4

The protest was organised by teacher aspirants who are opposed to changes announced by the Bihar Public Service Commission for the upcoming TRE-4 examination. Under the new pattern, the examination is to be conducted in two stages, while negative marking will continue in objective examinations. The protesting aspirants have demanded that the examination instead be conducted as a single examination and without negative marking.

On August 25, they began marching from Gandhi Maidan towards Chief Minister Samrat Choudhary’s residence. The protesters broke through police barricades during the march and reached Dak Bungalow Chowk, where police action followed. Aditya joined the protesters there with his parents.

Family now fears police harassment

Ranjit and Munni are a working-class couple. Ranjit has studied until Class 4 and works as a daily-wage labourer, earning around Rs 500 a day. Munni works as a domestic worker. The family lives in a single rented room. Aditya is their only child and studies in Class 1 at a private school. According to his parents, he enjoys Mathematics, Hindi and English and keeps a copy of the Constitution. The family says the events of August 25 have left them fearful of further police action. Ranjit told The Wire that he has stopped going to work for several days because he fears that police could arrest or assault him again. The family also says they did not eat or sleep properly after returning home that night. Munni said they kept wondering what they had done wrong. The family is now reportedly avoiding staying at home because of fears of police harassment.

Advocate Shivnandan Bharti, who is planning to file a writ petition concerning the incident, has described it as a case of illegal detention and questioned why the child was not simply handed over to his parents if the police intervention was solely for his safety.

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Amnesty Investigation finds unlawful and deadly force against CJP-led protesters in Delhi and Siwan

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Address Discrimination & Hate Crimes India told: CERD, UN

The post Six-year-old detained during Patna teacher aspirants’ protest, parents allege police assault appeared first on SabrangIndia.

According to KPSS, a communication dated August 23 and attributed to an outfit calling itself the United Liberation Council (ULC) has surfaced on social media. The communication reportedly carries the names and personal details of Kashmiri Pandit employees. The organisation says security agencies are examining its authenticity and origin, while reports have described the ULC as a suspected Lashkar-e-Taiba-linked proxy. KPSS stresses that irrespective of the eventual findings of the investigation, the circulation of a communication containing identifiable personal information is serious enough to warrant an immediate, transparent and credible security response.

The distinction is important. The press release does not present the authenticity of the threat as an established fact; rather, it calls for the authorities to investigate precisely that question. What KPSS argues is that the potential danger cannot be measured merely by whether the communication is ultimately proven genuine. The very fact that personal details of individuals are allegedly being circulated in a threatening context raises questions about how the information was obtained, who prepared and disseminated the material, and whether any local network or facilitation was involved.

SabrangIndia’s detailed reports featuring conversations with Sanjay Tickoo, president of the Kashmiri Pandit Sangharsh Samiti, on the two threatening letters can be read here, here and here.

A new medium for an old language of fear

For KPSS, the significance of the episode lies not only in the contents of the alleged threat but in the history it evokes. The organisation draws a direct parallel with the forms of intimidation experienced by Kashmiri Pandits in the 1990s. Threats that once travelled through walls, posters, mosque loudspeakers and whispered warnings can now circulate through social media, digital platforms and encrypted channels. The technology may have changed, but, KPSS argues, the psychological objective remains disturbingly familiar: creating the perception that a Kashmiri Pandit’s birthplace is conditional, his property negotiable, his presence temporary and his safety dependent upon the permission of others.

That history makes the present threat particularly significant for those who have attempted to return to or continue living in the Valley. KPSS argues that a Kashmiri Pandit does not become an outsider because extraordinary circumstances forced him or her to leave an ancestral home. Nor does the passage of decades erase ancestral belonging. The organisation frames the right to remember one’s home, return to it and live there without fear as questions of belonging and security rather than matters for which the community should have to seek permission or sympathy.

‘Brotherhood’ cannot replace protection

The press release also takes issue with recent remarks attributed to BJP General Secretary (Organisation), J&K, Ashok Koul, reportedly made at Tirth Raj Kapal Mochan Nagbal in Shopian while speaking about the return of Kashmiri Pandits and the need for social cohesion. According to KPSS, Koul was reported as saying that “targeted killings won’t stop” while emphasising the need to build brotherhood. KPSS says the statement should not be sensationalised or selectively interpreted, but argues that it nevertheless raises an unavoidable question: what does security mean for a community being encouraged to return if targeted violence is presented as something that may continue?

The organisation’s objection is not to the idea of brotherhood itself. It explicitly recognises social harmony as indispensable. Its argument is that social harmony cannot be treated as a substitute for institutional protection. “Brotherhood” without security, KPSS contends, risks becoming an appeal made to those who are already vulnerable while leaving the structural conditions of that vulnerability untouched. Protection requires functioning security mechanisms, intelligence, accountability and preventive action—not simply assurances following an incident.

The question is therefore not whether Kashmiri Pandits should have faith in their neighbours or in Kashmir’s pluralistic traditions. It is whether institutions can guarantee that such faith does not require them to accept an unacceptable level of risk.

The burden of return

KPSS also highlights what it sees as a contradiction in the political and social discourse surrounding the return of Kashmiri Pandits. The community’s return has frequently been described as essential to restoring Kashmir’s pluralistic character. Yet, the organisation argues, returning Pandits are repeatedly asked to adjust to the prevailing situation; concerns over security are met with assurances that conditions are improving; questions over ancestral property are directed towards the future; and when threats emerge again, those same individuals are expected to display patience and faith.

This leads to the central question posed by the press release: How many times must the victim prove his commitment to Kashmir before Kashmir proves its commitment to him?

For KPSS, the answer cannot be another appeal to resilience. Returning home should not require extraordinary courage. It should be an ordinary exercise of citizenship.

Avoiding collective blame—but not collective denial

The press release is also careful to distinguish between militant violence and the wider Kashmiri population. KPSS states that the majority community should not be collectively held responsible for crimes committed by militants, and that the actions of a few should not be indiscriminately attributed to an entire society. At the same time, however, it argues that society must be willing to examine the environment in which intimidation can emerge, personal information can circulate and threats can again be directed at a vulnerable minority.

This distinction is central to the organisation’s argument. Rejecting collective blame, it suggests, cannot mean refusing to examine the social and institutional conditions that allow threats to emerge or circulate.

The real test of security, KPSS argues, is not the response after violence has occurred but whether warning signs are recognised before they become violence. A society’s commitment to its minority communities cannot be measured only by the solidarity expressed after a killing; it must also be measured by whether people can live, work, worship, own property and return to their homes without having to first become victims for their humanity to be acknowledged.

What investigators must establish

The organisation’s most concrete demand is for scrutiny of the threat itself. Rather than reducing the episode to the question of whether a poster or digital communication is authentic, KPSS asks authorities to establish who prepared it, who circulated it, how the personal details were obtained, whether it represents a genuine operational threat, and whether there was any local facilitation or network involved in its preparation or dissemination.

These questions have a significance beyond this particular incident. If personal information belonging to vulnerable employees has been obtained and circulated in a threatening communication, determining the source and pathway of that information is essential to assessing the seriousness of the threat and preventing further targeting. KPSS consequently characterises these not as political questions but as security questions requiring credible answers.

Return must mean more than physical presence

The final portion of the press release turns from the immediate threat to the larger question of what a meaningful return of Kashmiri Pandits would actually entail. KPSS argues that genuine brotherhood must manifest itself through protection, institutional accountability, social vigilance and an unequivocal rejection of intimidation. It says Kashmiri Pandits do not need ceremonial expressions of solidarity but confidence that their lives will be protected before violence occurs. They also need safeguards for ancestral property and institutions capable of identifying threats before they become fatal.

The organisation’s broader concern is that Kashmir cannot convincingly claim to have moved beyond the past if threats against Kashmiri Pandits continue to reproduce the same underlying fear, even through different mediums and under different circumstances. The question, as KPSS frames it, is stark: will Kashmiri Pandits be able to return and live as equal citizens, or will every return continue to carry the warning that their presence is temporary and their safety uncertain?

Its demands are consequently straightforward: threats must be investigated, security must be guaranteed, personal information must be protected, ancestral property rights must be safeguarded, and the right to return must be treated as a matter of security and justice rather than courage and chance.

The complete press release may be read below:

Related:

‘Wherever You Go, We are watching’: Second threat letter to Kashmiri Pandits

How Can Rehabilitation Work If We Are Not Safe?’ Sanjay Tickoo on the fresh threat to Kashmiri Pandit employees

This is what we feared: Sanjay Tickoo on the rising attacks in Kashmir since March

Pleas of non-migrant Kashmiri Pandits have fallen on deaf ears: Sanjay Tickoo

Time has come to go on fast unto death: Sanjay Tickoo

Kashmiri Pandit leader Sanjay Tickoo talks about Governor’s Rule in J&K

A Kashmiri Pandit fact-checks The Kashmir Files

10 reasons why Kashmiri Pandits feel betrayed in the Valley

The post KPSS: Kashmiri Pandits need security, not ceremonial brotherhood appeared first on SabrangIndia.

But to reduce the events to a story of “students versus police” would obscure the larger crisis. The agitation is rooted in a much deeper and longstanding grievance over recruitment delays, examination irregularities, alleged paper leaks, the changing format of competitive examinations and a lack of confidence in the State’s recruitment machinery.

The violence on August 25 is therefore not an isolated law-and-order episode. It is the latest flashpoint in a protest movement that has been building for weeks — and one that has also produced disturbing allegations of excessive and abusive use of State power.

A protest over jobs, examinations and a system students no longer trust

Students have been holding a sit-in at Patna’s Gardanibagh since August 18. More than a dozen student and youth organisations have joined the agitation, with demands extending across the Bihar Public Service Commission (BPSC), Bihar Staff Selection Commission (BSSC), teacher recruitment and other government examinations.

At the centre of the immediate dispute is the fourth Teacher Recruitment Examination, or TRE-4. Students want the examination to be conducted in a single stage rather than the proposed preliminary-and-main format. They are also demanding the removal of negative marking, greater transparency in recruitment examinations and 100% domicile-based recruitment in government jobs and teacher appointments.

The scale of the recruitment opportunity is significant. The BPSC announced that TRE-4 would cover 32,388 teaching posts. According to The Indian Express, the proposed examination is expected to be held in December 2026 or January 2027, with applications scheduled from September 1 to September 30.  Students have also demanded cancellation of the 70th BPSC examination over alleged irregularities and a paper leak. The BPSC has rejected these allegations, saying that material circulated online was fake. It has also denied allegations of discrimination against Hindi-medium candidates..

Protester Vikas Bhatt, speaking to the media, pointed to the long delays in recruitment for posts such as librarians and the absence of regular examination calendars for several recruitment bodies. The New Indian Express reported his allegation that some recruitment processes announced through the BSSC had remained pending for years. The question confronting the Bihar government is consequently not merely whether students are willing to accept its assurances. It is whether the State has given them sufficient reason to trust those assurances.

The August 25 confrontation

On August 25, more than 1,500 students backed by 17 student organisations marched from the JP Roundabout near Gandhi Maidan under a call to “gherao” the Chief Minister’s residence, according to The Indian Express.  Police had erected barricades at Dak Bungalow Chowk to prevent the protesters from proceeding further. Students pushed through the barricades, leading to a confrontation with the police. The State responded with water cannons and a lathi-charge. Several students were detained. Two police personnel were also injured in the confrontation, according to The Telegraph, which reported that around 25 students were detained and later released without formal charges.

Other reports said students threw stones and that a police officer and a woman constable were injured. The violence cannot be ignored or excused: protesters who attack police personnel or damage public property must be held accountable through lawful procedures. But that does not settle the question of the State’s response.

A democratic government does not acquire unlimited authority merely because a protest becomes disorderly. The use of force must remain lawful, necessary and proportionate. The existence of barricades and a restricted area cannot by itself transform every protesting student into a threat requiring a coercive response.

The images from Patna — students facing lines of police personnel and water cannons — are particularly stark because the protesters were not demanding an overthrow of the constitutional order. They were demanding jobs, recruitment dates, examination reforms and accountability.

When the language of the State becomes dismissive

The confrontation was preceded by another controversy that exposed the widening distance between the administration and the protesters. BPSC Examination Controller Rajesh Kumar Singh, while responding to questions about the agitation, quoted the Hindi proverb: “Haathi chale bazaar, kutta bhaunke hazaar.” Protesters interpreted the remark as comparing them to barking dogs.

Singh subsequently expressed regret and said the statement had been taken out of context. But the Bihar government went further and suspended him following the controversy, according to The New Indian Express.  The suspension is significant. An official responsible for an examination system under intense public scrutiny cannot afford to speak about protesting candidates in language that can reasonably be understood as contemptuous or humiliating. Even if the proverb was not intended literally, the choice of language was extraordinarily insensitive given the circumstances. There is an important democratic principle here: the State must not dehumanise the citizen before it attempts to manage the protest. The students are not an inconvenience to be ignored until the barricades have to be erected. They are citizens raising grievances against institutions that exercise enormous power over their futures.

A much darker story lies behind the August protests

The allegations surrounding police conduct in Bihar go beyond what happened on August 25. A public hearing convened by the Bihar unit of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) on August 22 documented testimonies concerning police action during protests between July 21 and July 27.

According to the account published by Counterview, the hearing recorded 19 direct testimonies and allegations spanning physical assault, illegal detention, custodial torture, raids on homes, sexual violence against women protesters and other forms of intimidation. The allegations were made by protesters and activists and should be independently investigated rather than treated as established judicial findings.  The allegations are deeply disturbing. PUCL’s public hearing reportedly documented claims of targeted lathi-charges, police firing, the use of firearms, custodial abuse and violations during arrests and detention. Some testimonies also alleged that women were subjected to misogynistic abuse and physical assault.

There were also allegations concerning raids on homes. According to the report of the hearing, families claimed that police entered residences at night, assaulted residents, damaged property and subjected women to degrading treatment.

These are not allegations that a democratic government can simply dismiss as the inevitable excesses of policing. If even a fraction of these claims is true, the matter goes far beyond “crowd control”. It becomes a question of systemic abuse of police power. The PUCL hearing also raised allegations of discriminatory treatment of Muslims, Scheduled Caste persons, women and activists associated with CPI(ML), as well as allegations involving minors being detained without being produced before the appropriate authorities within legally prescribed timelines. These claims require independent verification and, if substantiated, prosecution and institutional accountability.

Even lawyers allegedly became targets

Perhaps the most alarming allegations concern those attempting to provide legal assistance to protesters. According to the PUCL public hearing account, two PUCL lawyer-members who were providing pro bono assistance to detained protesters were themselves allegedly confined and booked on charges that included liquor consumption and obstructing police duties. They were reportedly handcuffed and paraded in public.

If independently established, such conduct would strike at the heart of the right to legal representation and the functioning of the criminal justice system. Lawyers representing arrested protesters cannot be treated as extensions of the protest movement merely because they are providing legal assistance. A State that intimidates legal aid provider’s risk transforming access to justice itself into a casualty of protest policing.

PUCL has consequently demanded an independent investigation into police action between July 21 and July 27, including allegations of illegal detention, custodial torture, use of firearms and the alleged targeting of its lawyer-members. It has also sought withdrawal of 64 FIRs filed against protesting students and compensation for those injured in firing in Siwan. These demands should not be dismissed as political rhetoric. They warrant an impartial investigation capable of establishing what actually happened.

Detailed report may be read here.

The State cannot answer institutional failure with police power

The central contradiction in Bihar is difficult to miss. The students are protesting because they believe recruitment processes are unreliable. The government’s response has been to insist that their concerns have been addressed while simultaneously deploying a large police presence to prevent them from marching.

On August 25, the government announced the launch of Vidyarthi Sahyog Shivir, student support camps to be held on the fourth Tuesday of every month, along with an online grievance portal and helpline 1100. The stated purpose is to allow students to place their grievances directly before government officials.  Dialogue is welcome. But a grievance mechanism cannot become a substitute for substantive accountability.

Related:

Maharashtra: After backlash, govt. moves to withdraw FIRs against student protesters but questions remain

Youth Uprising: A protest, a brute crackdown, a continuing countrywide response

Mumbai stands with students, but the state pushes back

The exam crisis that became a battle for accountability

Brute Police Action: Mumbai’s crackdown on protestors in solidarity with CJP & Student Groups, AISF, SFI & AISA

The post Water Cannons Instead of Answers: Bihar’s recruitment crisis and the state’s crackdown on protest appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The investigation, released on August 26, draws on witness testimony as well as video and photographic material examined and verified by Amnesty International’s Evidence Lab. According to the organisation, its findings show the use of pellet-firing shotguns, tear gas launchers and grenades, batons, electric shock devices and firearms against protesters between July 20 and July 24 in Delhi and Siwan, Bihar. Amnesty says the manner in which these weapons were deployed breached international human rights standards as well as domestic policing guidelines.

The findings directly challenge the Delhi Police’s public account of the crackdown. Delhi Police had denied allegations of disproportionate force and described its handling of the protest as “professional”, including before the Supreme Court. Amnesty, however, says the evidence it verified contradicts that version of events.

For Amnesty International India Chair Aakar Patel, the episode represents something more serious than a conventional crowd-control operation. He described the authorities’ response as beginning with restrictions on communication, movement and assembly before escalating into what he called unnecessary or excessive force against peaceful protesters, including children. The organisation has characterised the response as “state-sanctioned violence masked as crowd control” and has pointed to the absence of accountability a month later as evidence of continuing impunity.

Evidence of pellet firing

One of the most serious findings concerns the use of shotguns capable of firing pellet ammunition. Amnesty’s Evidence Lab verified 17 videos filmed in central Delhi on July 20, covering areas around Jantar Mantar, Sansad Marg and Connaught Place, as well as two videos from Siwan in Bihar recorded on July 24. The Delhi footage was found to show personnel belonging to the Delhi Police, Rapid Action Force (RAF) and Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF).

Two videos verified by Amnesty show an RAF officer firing a shotgun into a crowd at the Connaught Place–Sansad Marg intersection. Two other verified videos show protesters near the same location with injuries consistent with birdshot wounds. Amnesty also verified CCTV footage showing two RAF officers carrying shotguns elsewhere in the area.

The significance of the finding lies in the nature of the ammunition. Birdshot consists of multiple small metal pellets and is inherently inaccurate, Amnesty says, creating a serious risk not only to the intended target but also to bystanders. The organisation states that birdshot has been associated with deaths and blindness in other contexts and argues that it has no legitimate place in law enforcement.

A protester interviewed by Amnesty described being struck from behind while attempting to flee. According to the testimony, the individual sustained approximately 25 to 30 pellet wounds and required hospital treatment. The protester said doctors confirmed that the injuries were caused by pellets and that the incident had left extensive scarring.

The alleged absence of a warning is also significant. India’s Bureau for Police Research and Development guidelines recommend that security forces warn protesters before deploying less-lethal or lethal force. International standards similarly require law-enforcement agencies to exhaust non-violent means wherever possible and issue a clear warning before resorting to force when circumstances permit. Amnesty says the protester it interviewed reported receiving no warning before the pellet firing.

The allegations had previously been rejected by Delhi Police, which described reports of pellet injuries as “Fake News” and called them “completely false and misleading”. The police also warned that legal action could be taken against those allegedly spreading rumours.

However, the Amnesty investigation comes alongside other reporting cited in the organisation’s findings. The Hindu reported that an RAF unit fired two ballistic cartridges loaded with plastic pellets on the evening of July 20 on the orders of a Deputy Commissioner of Police. An internal CRPF inquiry reportedly found that RAF personnel had fired at least seven rounds containing metal pellets. An RTI response cited by The Hindu indicated that at least ten people were injured by pellets during the protests.

Tear gas used against protesters

Amnesty’s investigation also raises concerns about how tear gas was deployed. One verified video shows a tear gas grenade landing close to a group of protesters and exploding with a heavy blast. Amnesty says another verified sequence showed the grenade exploding immediately after landing near protesters, with one person attempting to escape before being thrown to the ground.

Eyewitnesses told Amnesty that tear gas grenades were fired directly towards protesters rather than being launched at an angle above their heads. The organisation says this is inconsistent with UN guidance on less-lethal weapons. More fundamentally, Amnesty argues that the use of tear gas should be restricted to situations involving widespread and serious violence. While acknowledging that there were isolated incidents of protesters throwing stones, it says the available evidence does not indicate violence on a scale that would meet that threshold.

This distinction is crucial. Crowd-control powers are not unlimited simply because a protest becomes difficult to manage. The question is whether the force used is necessary and proportionate to the threat actually posed. Amnesty’s findings suggest that, in several instances, the authorities crossed that line.

Lathis, including against peaceful protesters

The investigation further documents what Amnesty describes as frequent misuse of long, flexible batons, or lathis. The organisation verified eight videos showing Delhi Police and RAF personnel striking protesters, including a young boy who, according to Amnesty, offered no provocation or resistance. In some instances, officers allegedly struck people indiscriminately across different parts of their bodies. One verified video shows a man who had been knocked to the ground being repeatedly struck while he was unable to move or pose an apparent threat.

Amnesty notes that the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture has described such long flexible batons as inherently cruel, inhuman or degrading because they can deliver greater kinetic force than conventional batons, increasing the risk of serious injury. The investigation also identifies another accountability concern: the presence of plain-clothes men participating in beatings.

In at least two verified videos, men in plain clothes—including some wearing black helmets marked “Delhi Police”—are seen beating protesters with lathis. Uniformed officers appear to escort them towards the crowd but do not intervene, according to Amnesty. The organisation also points to the apparent absence of visible identification such as name tags or badge numbers, which it says violates the principle that law-enforcement officials must be identifiable during encounters involving the use of force.

Electric shock weapons under scrutiny

Amnesty also verified a video showing an RAF officer using an electric shock baton against a peaceful protester. The organisation argues that direct-contact electric shock devices cause severe pain without necessarily incapacitating a person and that there are less harmful alternatives available to law enforcement. Amnesty, together with the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, has called for their complete prohibition because of the risks of severe suffering, psychological harm, lasting disability and, in cases of prolonged use, death.

The finding therefore adds another layer to the concerns raised by the report: the issue is not simply the quantity of force used, but the choice of weapons and methods deployed against people participating in an assembly.

An assault rifle in Siwan

Perhaps the most alarming footage examined by Amnesty comes not from Delhi but from Siwan, Bihar. Two videos filmed on July 24 and verified by Amnesty show a state police officer firing an AK-type assault rifle towards protesters. Amnesty notes that such firearms are designed to kill and, under international standards governing assemblies, may only be used where there is an imminent threat of death or serious injury to a specific individual and only as an absolute last resort. The organisation says it found no evidence that such a threat existed in the incident examined.

The report says authorities have made no public commitment to investigate or prosecute officers involved in the alleged use of firearms, birdshot, tear gas, lathis and electric shock weapons. Amnesty is calling for a prompt, impartial and effective investigation, with the findings made public. It has specifically demanded an immediate end to the deployment of birdshot ammunition and direct-contact electric shock devices.

The crackdown began before the first baton was raised

The Amnesty investigation also places the use of force within the wider restrictions imposed on the “Chalo Sansad” march. Authorities denied permission for the march, imposed an internet shutdown around the proposed protest areas, prohibited gatherings of more than five people, closed several Delhi Metro stations and erected barricades across central Delhi.

Amnesty argues that these measures themselves raise serious freedom-of-assembly concerns. Under international human rights law, peaceful assemblies are not supposed to depend on prior permission. Where notification requirements exist, their purpose should be to allow authorities to facilitate an assembly rather than provide a mechanism for restricting it. The organisation further argues that the prohibitory orders effectively amounted to a blanket ban on the march and failed the requirements of legality, necessity and proportionality. It reaches a similar conclusion regarding the blanket internet shutdown imposed around the protest.

This is an important aspect of Amnesty’s findings. The report does not examine the July 20 violence simply as an isolated confrontation between protesters and police. It places the physical use of force within a broader sequence of restrictions—communication blackouts, movement restrictions, barricading, transport disruption and prohibitory orders—that had already narrowed the space for protest.

More than 400 injured

The scale of the confrontation was substantial. According to Delhi Police, more than 400 people, including police personnel and protesters, were injured. Amnesty also notes that at least three people were injured in Siwan, including a bystander who was shot and sustained a bullet wound to the neck. The report’s findings therefore raise questions extending beyond individual incidents captured on camera. If hundreds were injured during the police response, and if independently verified footage shows the deployment of weapons in circumstances Amnesty considers unlawful, the central question becomes one of institutional accountability: who authorised the force, who carried it out, who monitored it, and who is responsible for investigating it? A month after the events, Amnesty says there has been no public commitment from the authorities to investigate or prosecute officers involved.

Amnesty places the July events against the longer history of pellet-gun use by Indian authorities. The organisation has previously documented extensive injuries, including blindness and deaths, linked to the use of birdshot-loaded shotguns for crowd control in Jammu and Kashmir. A committee established by the Ministry of Home Affairs in 2016 to consider alternatives recommended restricting the use of such weapons to the “rarest of rare cases”, although it did not recommend a complete prohibition.

In 2018, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights called on India to end the use of pellet-firing shotguns for crowd control in Jammu and Kashmir. A petition seeking to decommission the use of pellet-firing shotguns by law-enforcement agencies for policing assemblies was also filed before the Supreme Court in July 2026. The Delhi allegations therefore revive a longstanding question about whether weapons that have caused severe and sometimes permanent injuries in crowd-control situations should be used at all.

From “crowd control” to accountability

The central thrust of Amnesty International’s investigation is ultimately about the limits of state power. The State unquestionably has a responsibility to protect people, maintain public order and respond to violence. But policing a protest does not give authorities an unrestricted licence to use force. International standards require force to be lawful, necessary and proportionate, with lethal force reserved for exceptional circumstances involving an imminent threat to life or serious injury.

Amnesty’s evidence raises questions on each of those fronts. Its investigation alleges pellet firing into crowds, tear gas deployed directly at protesters, repeated baton strikes against people who were not resisting, the use of an electric shock device against a peaceful protester and the firing of an assault rifle in Siwan. It also documents restrictions on communication and assembly before and during the protest.

The significance of the report lies not merely in its catalogue of weapons. It is the combination of restriction, force and apparent absence of accountability that makes the findings particularly troubling. The Delhi Police has maintained that its handling of the protest was professional. Amnesty’s investigation reaches a sharply different conclusion, backed by 19 videos it says its Evidence Lab verified across Delhi and Siwan, alongside witness testimony and photographic evidence.

The complete report may be viewed here.

Related:

From the violence of 2024 to the Bakri Eid tensions of 2026, a fact-finding report examines Mira Road’s deepening communal fault lines

Bihar: Not just Delhi, Patna, Siwan too saw brute police violence against demonstrating students: PUCL

Inside the SSP’s Office: Allegations of beatings, torture & police impunity against farmer leaders in Meerut, UP

‘Wherever You Go, We are watching’: Second threat letter to Kashmiri Pandits

The post Amnesty Investigation finds unlawful and deadly force against CJP-led protesters in Delhi and Siwan appeared first on SabrangIndia.

To date, the issue of police brutality that has received national attention is the barbarity displayed in the capital of Delhi on July 20. Reports on this aspect of overt police misconduct may be read here, here and here. However, the conduct of the state police in another BJP-ruled state like Bihar has received scant attention.

Following newspaper reports of this brutality in Patna and Siwan, the PUCL’s Bihar Unit constituted a fact-finding team to investigate the cases of police firing and bullet injuries sustained by students, custodial torture of students resulting in severe hearing loss sustained by a student, and intimidation acts of the police. The team visited Siwan on the August 15 and 16 and met all the injured victims of either police firing or custodial torture. It also came across cases of intimidation by police, house raids, and damage to property and beating, profiling of victims on the lines of caste and religion, and attempts to destroy evidence. This report is also being prepared. Similarly, PUCL acted on a complaint regarding police brutality unleashed on the students of a welfare hostel in Sitamarhi, where a day before the July 22 protests, the police entered the hostel and brutally beat students. This incident is currently under investigation.

Thereafter, on August 22, at the IMA Hall, Gandhi Maidan. Patna, a public hearing was conducted to record testimonies and first person accounts of the statewide police brutality between July 21-25 in several locations of the state. The report was released today. This was a part of the human rights platform’s decision post July 25 to comprehensively document cases of police brutality, violating the human rights of Indian citizens guaranteed by the law, PUCL decided to hold a public hearing so that the voices of the victims could be captured and incorporated in its report.

As mentioned above, the public hearing was organised on 22 August 2026 at the Indian Medical Association (IMA) Hall, South-East Gandhi Maidan, Patna. Over one hundred people participated, comprising mostly students, PUCL members, and civil society activists. Most students belonged to organisations such as AISA, AISF, Disha Chhatra Sangathan, and NSUI. One student activist, and a victim of police violence as well, belonged to Chhatra RJD. A panel, comprising Basant Chaudhary (senior advocate, Patna High Court), Sudha Varghese (Padma Shri awardee, social worker), Arshad Ajman (social activist), and Pranav Chaudhary (former Assistant Editor of the Times of India, Patna edition), presided over the proceedings. A total of 19 victims of police brutality presented their testimonies. Of these 19 victims of police violence, a recorded video testimony of Bullet Kumar Gond, an ST youth from Siwan district, was presented as his bullet injuries and subsequent intramedullary nailing did not permit travel.

Based on the testimonies during the public hearing, also supported by the fact-findings in Siwan and Patna, the following types of cases of police brutality, seriously infringing upon human rights of the protesters, were recorded:

1. Brutal lathi charge deliberately targeting students to injure them. In some cases, beating of students happened outside the sites of protests or at the timings of the bandh call.
2. Hitting girl protesters on their private parts.
3. Firing directly on students, without any warning or immediate provocations, resulting in several cases of bullet injuries. In some instances, those injured by bullets were further beaten up.
4. Using a firearm as lethal as the AK-47 on students, though this firearm is not supposed to be used on protesting citizens.
5. Custodial torture of students by the police, resulting in injuries, loss of hearing, etc.
6. Illegal detention of students without presenting them before a magistrate within 24 hours.
7. Detained students’ families not informed of their whereabouts, thus denying the students the support of their families and lawyers.
8. Students sent to judicial custody without informing them of the charges against them or providing them with a copy of the FIR.
9. Students sent to judicial custody without access to a lawyer to defend them before the magistrate.
10. Destruction of evidence by police, such as seizing students’ and passerby citizens’ mobile phones to destroy video recordings related to the use of force by them.
11. Raiding students’ and activists’ homes in the dead of night without any search warrant. Beating of residents, damaging household items, abusing women, including older women, and infringing the right to privacy by checking mobile and personal belongings.
12. Making misogynist remarks against girls during home raids and in custody. For example, family members being warned that the girl will not find a groom if she participates in protests along with boys.
13. Obstructing an officer of the court (advocate on record of the Patna High Court) in discharging his duty to represent his client, filing FIRs against two lawyers in unsubstantiated charges of liquor consumption and another charge of obstructing the police officer in discharging their duty, parading them handcuffed in public, and leaking their arrest memo photos to the media.
14. Custodialisation and beating of citizens who were passersby at that moment. One such passerby was hit by a bullet fired by police in Siwan.
15. Even minors kept in police custody, not presented before the Child Welfare Committee and the JJ Board.
16. Calling students terrorists. Threatening protesters during their custody of imposing UAPA and making them suffer like Umar Khalid.
17. Profiling of arrested protesters on religious and caste lines, and differential treatment with them based on these lines. In particular, Muslims, SCs, women, and CPI (ML) activists were harshly treated.

The panellists were unanimous in their opinion that the testimonies made the entire state culpable and, rather than calling it merely police brutality, it should be called state brutality or state repression. It is only when the government decides to crush a movement that the police unleash their brutality ruthlessly.

Hence, the PUCL seeks accountability of the state for human rights violations.

Demands of the PUCL, Bihar

Towards the end of the public hearing, PUCL Bihar Unit presented a charter of demands and also announced its future action plan. The key demands are as follows:

• An independent and impartial investigation into the police actions starting from 21 July to July 27, 2026, including but not limited to the use of firearms in Siwan and Jehanabad, brutal lathi charge against protesters throughtout the state, illegal detention, custodial torture, violations of legal provisions while remanding the detained protestors to judicial custody, harassment of activists even after the protests were over, and mistreatment of two lawyer members of PUCL and imposition of false cases against them. The inquiry should also include brutal police action inside the welfare hostel in Sitamarhi on the evening of July 21.
• Fixing accountability for police brutality and stern punitive action against police officials at various levels who violated the rights of protesters and other victims.
• Fast-tracking the process to withdraw all 64 FIRs against protesting students. Identification and withdrawal of cases filed even after 6 pm on 26 July if they are related to the protests and Bihar bandh, and also related to the protests filed by private individuals against the protesters.
• Adequate compensation for all persons injured in the Siwan firing, commensurate with the nature and seriousness of their injuries.
• Protection of the constitutional right to peaceful protest, so that students, activists and ordinary citizens are not subjected to violence merely for raising their voices.
• Review of the police manual and police training and suitable changes therein so that police are sensitive about civil rights and regulating the protesting crowd, and do not resort to brutal methods.

Background: It was on July 25, several PUCL members raised their worries after watching and reading the news about Bihar police’s brutal action against protesting students in Patna and other parts of the state. Hundreds of student protesters and others were detained in several police stations, and some were even sent to judicial custody. There was also news of injuries sustained by several protesters due to lathi charge, police firing, and tear gas shelling. Police picked some students and youth activists from their homes. Some non-participating youth who just happened to pass by the site of protests were picked up by the police and detained or sent to jail. We also received news of the beating of some students in police custody.

It is in these circumstances that the PUCL Bihar Unit decided to play an active role in providing immediate legal support to detained or jailed protesters and other youth and, for this purpose, collaborated with the Jan Nyay Abhiyan in Patna and other districts. A group of lawyers worked day and night to identify detained or jailed protesters, file their bail petitions, meet those in police custody to assess their physical condition and needs, and accompany them when police presented them before a judicial magistrate. While performing this important role of a human rights defender and also as officers of the court, two of the PUCL lawyer members were kept in illegal confinement and implicated in false cases. Currently, they are on bail.

Action Plan

All testimonies and remarks by the panellists, as well as fact-finding reports, will form an important part of a detailed report on state repression unleashed on protesting students. PUCL sees this report as a useful tool for seeking justice for the victims. The report will be submitted to relevant government offices, commissions, legislative committees, courts, police and judicial training institutions, academic institutions, and other civil rights organisations. The full report will be printed and disseminated, and its summary will be sent for publication to newspapers, news portals, magazines and journals.

On the legal front, PUCL plans to hold a meeting with prominent lawyers to explore the possibility of filing a writ in the High Court and/or other actions, as per their advice. Together with Jan Nyay Abhiyan, PUCL will also monitor the withdrawal of 64 FIRs related to student protests, as per the government’s announcement. Moreover, there are still cases filed by private individuals or the police but not listed in the 64 FIRs.

An invitation was received during the public hearing to conduct a similar public hearing in Jehanabad on the use of firearms and other brutal methods employed by the police against protesters. The PUCL has stated that it will pursue the invitation and also explore the possibility of organising public hearings in Siwan and Sitamarhi.

Related:

Maharashtra: After backlash, govt. moves to withdraw FIRs against student protesters but questions remain

Youth Uprising: A protest, a brute crackdown, a continuing countrywide response

Mumbai stands with students, but the state pushes back

The exam crisis that became a battle for accountability

Brute Police Action: Mumbai’s crackdown on protestors in solidarity with CJP & Student Groups, AISF, SFI & AISA

The post Bihar: Not just Delhi, Patna, Siwan too saw brute police violence against demonstrating students: PUCL appeared first on SabrangIndia.

According to her husband, Jumman Fakir, the family soon received a call from the Mumbai Police’s Chembur Crime Branch. Sahida had been detained on suspicion of being an “illegal immigrant”. Within days, the family was told that she had been sent to Bangladesh. Her husband says he had repeatedly approached the authorities with documents establishing her identity and roots in West Bengal, but they were allegedly disregarded. Sahida eventually called her family from Satkhira, Bangladesh.

The story, first reported in detail by Scroll on August 11, is disturbing not merely because of what allegedly happened to one woman, but because of the larger question it raises: what happens when the State begins treating Bengali identity as evidence of foreignness?

The Indian Express separately reported that Sahida was detained on July 18 and that sources said she was taken to Assam before being pushed across the border along with others. The report also provided that her family was preparing to approach the Calcutta High Court and that a migrant workers’ forum had written to the Ministry of External Affairs seeking intervention.

The facts, as reported, demand something more than administrative clarification. They demand scrutiny of the entire architecture through which a person can apparently move from being a resident of India to being labelled an “infiltrator”, detained and ultimately expelled from the country without a meaningful opportunity to contest that determination.

A woman disappears, and the State’s explanation is suspicion

Sahida’s case is particularly troubling because her family says it did not merely possess one disputed identity document. They produced a birth certificate recording her birth in Swarupdaha village in West Bengal in 1988. They produced a school certificate, a voter identity card issued in 2008, documents relating to land in Gobindapur, and records concerning her family. Her parents’ names, according to Scroll, also appeared in the 2002 electoral rolls.

None of these documents, individually, should be treated as an automatic and conclusive certificate of citizenship. That distinction matters. A voter ID, Aadhaar or land document cannot, by itself, settle every question concerning citizenship. But that is precisely why the State’s obligation becomes more important, not less.  If citizenship is disputed, the answer cannot simply be deportation. The dispute must first be investigated.

Sahida’s husband told Scroll that police asked for the birth certificates of her parents even after he had produced her own birth certificate and other documents. He said the family could not provide such certificates because they were from a generation in which birth registration was not common. That raises an obvious question: how much documentation must a poor citizen produce before the State believes that she belongs to the country in which she was born and has lived?

For months, instances of forced deportations and illegal pushbacks have surfaced from Assam, West Bengal, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Delhi of individuals “suspected” of being Bangladeshi nationals. In many of these cases, the family of those deported have approached the courts alleging that the removals were carried out without any disclosed nationality verification, without travel documents, and without Bangladesh formally acknowledging or accepting the individuals concerned.

Detailed reports may be read here, here, here, here and here.

The most dangerous word in this story is “suspected”

There is a profound legal difference between suspecting that someone may be a foreign national and establishing that they are one. The first is an investigative starting point. The second is a legal conclusion. Sahida’s case, as reported, appears to collapse the two. Scroll reported that the family was not given documents relating to her arrest or detention and that the Mumbai and Navi Mumbai police did not respond to questions seeking clarification about the grounds for her detention.

When the State takes away a person’s liberty, the burden of public accountability does not disappear merely because the allegation involves “illegal immigration”. If anything, the stakes are higher because the consequence may ultimately be removal from the country itself. The Constitution does not create a zone of executive immunity around immigration enforcement.

Article 21 protects life and personal liberty. Article 14 demands non-arbitrariness and equality before the law. Article 22 contains safeguards concerning arrest and detention. These constitutional protections cannot become conditional upon whether the person is socially respectable, economically secure or perceived to “look Indian”. And the constitutional question becomes particularly serious when a person is allegedly identified not through a properly adjudicated finding but through a combination of suspicion and social profiling.

The border cannot become a substitute for a hearing

Sahida’s husband told Scroll that she was detained because she was Bengali. In Maharashtra, the crackdown has become increasingly expansive. Hindustan Times reported in March that the state government told the Legislative Council that more than 2,000 alleged illegal Bangladeshi nationals had been deported in 2025, compared with 202 in 2024, and that the state planned intensive “combing operations” in slums, construction sites and other areas. There is nothing inherently unlawful about a State identifying and removing foreign nationals who are illegally present. Immigration control is a legitimate governmental function. The danger begins when the hunt for foreigners becomes a hunt for people who appear foreign.

The physical act of pushing someone across an international border has consequences that are fundamentally different from ordinary detention. Once a person is in Bangladesh, an Indian court’s ability to protect her becomes substantially more complicated. Access to lawyers, family members and documents becomes difficult. The very act of deportation can therefore create a second legal problem out of the first. This is exactly what makes Sahida’s account so alarming. According to the Indian Express, she said she was taken to the Assam border and pushed into Bangladesh at around 1 a.m. She reportedly walked for hours through muddy fields before local residents helped her and a family in Satkhira provided her shelter.

A precedent already exists for bringing people back

The danger of mistaken deportation is no longer theoretical. In 2025, several Bengali-speaking residents working outside West Bengal were detained and sent across the Bangladesh border amid claims that they were Bangladeshi nationals. One of the most consequential cases involved Sunali Khatun, her husband and their son. The Calcutta High Court’s September 2025 judgment in Bhodu Sekh v. Union of India is particularly relevant. The court examined the deportation of Sunali Khatun, Danish and their son Sabir. The authorities had argued that the family had failed to establish Indian citizenship. But the court also considered the procedure prescribed by the Union’s May 2, 2025 memorandum for persons suspected of being Bangladeshi or Myanmar nationals who claimed Indian citizenship in another State.

The memorandum contemplated verification by the State or district from which the person claimed to originate. Where a person claimed Indian citizenship and residence in another State, the concerned authorities were required to seek verification from that State and district administration. The judgment records that such verification was to be undertaken within a specified period, during which the person could be kept in a holding centre.

The Calcutta High Court ultimately held that the procedure had not been followed and described the authorities’ action as being undertaken in “hot haste”. It set aside the detention and deportation orders concerning Sunali, Danish and Sabir and directed the authorities to take steps to bring them back to India. In May 2026, the Union told the Supreme Court that it would bring back people deported to Bangladesh and verify their citizenship claims. All those six deported in this case are now back in India.

Detailed reports may be read here and here.

Notably, a separate affidavit was filed by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) on July 31, 2026 in Rajubala Das v. Union of India pursuant to the Supreme Court’s order dated March 21, 2025. The affidavit sought to explain the legal and administrative framework governing deportation where the nationality of a declared foreigner remains unknown or unverified. In doing so, the Union makes one of its clearest judicial admissions to date: deportation cannot even be initiated unless the individual’s nationality has first been verified by the receiving State, appropriate travel documents have been obtained, and the receiving country has agreed to accept the individual.

The affidavit fundamentally distinguishes between being declared a foreigner and being legally deportable. While a declaration by a Foreigners Tribunal may settle a person’s legal status within India, it does not, the Union now accepts, authorise the State to physically remove that individual from Indian territory. Deportation remains contingent upon a separate process involving diplomatic engagement, nationality verification, issuance of travel documents and, most importantly, the consent of another sovereign State. In other words, the executive cannot unilaterally deport a person merely because Indian authorities believe them to be a foreign national.

Detailed report may be read here.

The SIR connection makes the situation even more sensitive

Sahida’s case also comes amid intense scrutiny of electoral citizenship verification in West Bengal. According to Scroll, Sahida’s parents appeared on the 2002 electoral roll, while Sahida herself was marked “under adjudication” in the recent Special Intensive Revision process, with an appeal pending before the relevant tribunal. The fact that an electoral-roll dispute exists cannot itself establish whether Sahida is or is not an Indian citizen. But it does reinforce why administrative processes must remain separate and carefully bounded. Being excluded from an electoral roll is not the same thing as being declared a foreign national.

Indeed, in August 2025, the Supreme Court sought clarity from the Centre on the standard operating procedure governing deportation drives and specifically raised concerns about allegations that Bengali-speaking minorities were being singled out. The Court observed that while persons attempting to illegally cross into India could be dealt with at the border, once a person was already inside the country, the law prescribed a procedure.

Over the past few months, multiple petitions before the Supreme Court and High Courts have alleged that persons suspected of being Bangladeshi nationals were taken across the international border without any publicly disclosed deportation process. In several cases, families have alleged that individuals were picked up without prior notice, denied access to lawyers or relatives, and removed without any disclosed deportation order or travel documents.

Detailed report may be read here, here, here and here.

Related:

‘Deportation Cannot Begin without Nationality Verification’: Union’s Rajubala affidavit clarifies legal limits on executive power

Aadhaar, Voter ID and PAN Cannot Prove Citizenship: Calcutta High Court’s Foreigners Order and the burden of belonging

They Belong Here: An elderly couple’s victory for citizenship

Another CJP Victory: Barpeta Tribunal declares Alam Khan ‘not a foreigner’

When a narrow reading of documents decide citizenship: GHC in Aminul Hoque

‘Fairness & reason ‘: SC rules that due process is a must for citizenship determination

Gauhati High Court upholds foreigner declaration, rejects mental illness plea

The post When Suspicion Becomes Deportation: The case of Sahida Fakir and the dangerous criminalisation of Bengali identity appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Recent figures reported through an RTI investigation by The Indian Express suggest that India is witnessing an unprecedented expansion of government-backed content restrictions. Between March and July 2026, government agencies issued nearly 1.95 lakh blocking directions to Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. According to the report, this amounted to roughly 1,275 directions every day, or approximately one direction every 68 seconds. Instagram alone received nearly one lakh directions, Facebook around 80,000 and YouTube approximately 15,000.

The scale becomes even more striking when compared with the previous period for which comparable figures are available. RTI data accessed by The Indian Express showed that between October 2024 and October 2025, 2,312 blocking orders were sent to 19 online platforms through the government’s Sahyog portal. That amounted to roughly six orders a day. In the following five months, directions to just three major platforms rose to almost 1.95 lakh. Such a dramatic increase cannot be treated merely as an administrative statistic. It raises a much larger question about the changing relationship between the State, technology companies and citizens in India’s digital public sphere. And the timing makes that question even more difficult to ignore.

When protest moves online, censorship follows

A significant proportion of the latest blocking directions reportedly coincided with the student protests over examination irregularities and leaks in Delhi. The Indian Express, citing a senior government official, reported that a considerable share of the directions were issued as the NEET protests gathered momentum, particularly on Instagram. This is important because Instagram was not simply being used as a space in which the protests were discussed after they happened. It became one of the principal spaces through which the movement itself was organised.

The material compiled in the research shows how the Cockroach Janta Party’s social-media presence became central to the mobilisation, with protest announcements, videos, memes, explainers and other political content circulating rapidly among young users. The account reportedly grew to millions of followers and played an important role in mobilising people for demonstrations, including the July 20 “Sansad Chalo” march. That transformation of social media into a political organising space has a profound constitutional consequence.

A protest today does not begin only when people gather on a street. It begins when people communicate. They decide where to meet, circulate information about police action, share videos from the ground, publicise their demands and tell others what is happening. The digital space has therefore become part of the infrastructure of democratic protest itself. Consequently, restricting that space can affect far more than an individual’s ability to upload a post. It can affect the ability of a movement to organise, document itself and communicate with the wider public. This is why the reported restrictions during the protests deserve particularly close scrutiny.

Article 14, for instance, reported that journalist Sadhika Tiwari’s video showing a student allegedly being beaten by police was blocked on X following a government order. The video, according to the report, showed a crying student and did not contain hate speech, misinformation or graphic imagery. Around the same period, Meta temporarily blocked the Instagram account associated with CJP, which reportedly had more than 23 million followers, although the account was subsequently restored after criticism. The significance of such incidents lies not merely in whether one particular video was lawfully restricted. It lies in the fact that videos documenting State action during a protest are themselves part of the democratic record.

If citizens cannot see what happened on the streets, they cannot independently evaluate competing claims about what happened there. If videos documenting police conduct disappear before they can circulate widely, public debate becomes dependent increasingly upon official accounts of events. That is precisely where the problem of censorship becomes a problem of democracy.

The three-hour problem

The most troubling development, however, may not be the number of takedown directions alone. It is the shrinking amount of time available to platforms to respond to them. As Article 14 reported, the period within which intermediaries are expected to comply with certain government requests has been progressively reduced, eventually reaching three hours in 2026. The investigation linked this shrinking compliance period with the sharp increase in government takedown directions. Three hours may sound like an administrative efficiency measure. It is not difficult to see why it becomes something much more consequential when the subject is constitutionally protected speech.

Imagine a government order directing a platform to remove a journalist’s report. Before complying, the platform would ideally need to determine whether the issuing authority has jurisdiction, whether the order identifies the material adequately, whether the statutory requirements have been met, whether the content actually falls within the legal grounds for restriction and whether the restriction is proportionate. The affected journalist may also need an opportunity to respond. A court may eventually have to examine the order. Yet the platform is given only a few hours to act.

Under those circumstances, the rational institutional response is unlikely to be a careful legal assessment. It is likely to be compliance first and review later. That creates an important constitutional problem. A system that imposes severe consequences for delayed compliance but relatively weak consequences for wrongful removal creates an obvious incentive for platforms to err on the side of deletion. The consequence is what free-speech activists have long warned about: over-removal.

Lawful speech does not have to be formally prohibited for censorship to occur. It is enough for platforms to become sufficiently afraid of retaining controversial material that they begin removing content whenever there is doubt.

Sahyog and the transformation of censorship into infrastructure

The government’s Sahyog portal illustrates another aspect of this changing architecture. Introduced in October 2024, Sahyog was designed to streamline communication between government authorities and online intermediaries. In itself, there is nothing inherently problematic about creating an administrative mechanism through which lawful government directions can be communicated to technology companies. But administrative efficiency cannot substitute for constitutional safeguards.

Article 14 reported that X challenged Sahyog before the Karnataka High Court, arguing that the system effectively facilitated censorship by allowing government requests to reach platforms through a centralised mechanism. The Karnataka High Court rejected the challenge in July 2025 and characterised Sahyog as a facilitation mechanism rather than an independent censorship authority. That judicial characterisation is important, but it does not end the constitutional debate.

A communication system may technically be nothing more than a channel. The real constitutional question concerns what happens after the communication reaches the platform. If a government direction arrives through an official portal, carries the appearance of State authority and has to be acted upon within three hours, the practical ability of a platform to question that direction becomes extremely limited. The portal may facilitate communication.

But when that communication is backed by an extremely short compliance window and automated enforcement, the overall system can begin functioning as something considerably more powerful: an infrastructure through which State decisions about speech are translated rapidly into restrictions on citizens’ access to information.

When the algorithm becomes the censor

This is perhaps the most disturbing development. According to The Indian Express, Meta integrated its systems with Sahyog to comply with the three-hour requirement, allowing content identified through government directions to be restricted or removed automatically rather than waiting for a separate human review before compliance. Automation is attractive because it makes compliance efficient. But constitutional rights are precisely the kind of interests that should make us suspicious of efficiency without accountability.

A human decision-maker can, at least theoretically, ask whether a government direction is valid. An automated system cannot meaningfully interrogate the constitutional legitimacy of the State’s demand. It receives an instruction and executes it. The danger is therefore not simply that the government can order content to be removed. The danger is that a government instruction can increasingly be converted into an automated technical command. The chain becomes remarkably simple: the State issues the direction, the platform’s system receives it, the content is restricted and the user discovers that the speech has disappeared.

A citizen cannot challenge a decision that they cannot see

The question of notice is therefore central. Alt News has documented instances in which users received generic notifications stating that content had been restricted pursuant to a legal request or through an automated process, without being provided meaningful information about the specific legal basis or authority involved.

This creates a basic procedural problem. If a person does not know who ordered the restriction, they cannot determine whether the authority had jurisdiction. If they do not know which law was invoked, they cannot assess whether the restriction is legally sustainable. If they do not know why their particular content was unlawful, they cannot meaningfully challenge the decision. And if they cannot access the order itself, they may not even know what exactly they are supposed to challenge. This is where transparency stops being a policy preference and becomes a constitutional necessity. The State cannot reasonably expect citizens to defend their right to speak against an order whose existence, reasoning and legal basis remain hidden from them.

The disappearance of journalism is more serious than the disappearance of content

The consequences become particularly serious when the material being restricted is journalism. Article 14 reported that in March 2026 alone, Facebook pages belonging to at least six news and digital publications were blocked. The report also identified restrictions involving Greater Kashmir, Rising Kashmir, Kashmir Life, Molitics India, National Dastak and 4PM News Network, among others. The Wire, Maktoob Media and Peek TV have similarly reported restrictions affecting their content.

The problem here is fundamentally different from the removal of ordinary user-generated material. A journalist reporting on a protest is not simply generating “content”. They are creating a record of a public event. A report about Kashmir may become part of the historical record of the region, a video documenting police action may later become evidence in litigation, or a report concerning government policy may inform electoral choices. When such material disappears without clear explanation, the damage therefore extends beyond the individual publisher.

The public loses access to information that may be essential to holding power accountable. That is why the freedom of the press cannot be protected merely by allowing newspapers to continue printing. In 2026, press freedom also requires journalists to be able to reach audiences through the digital platforms on which those audiences increasingly depend.

The State’s concern about decentralised communication is not irrelevant — but it is not enough

The controversy surrounding Bitchat, Briar and Bridgefy demonstrates that the problem extends beyond mainstream social-media platforms. During the Jantar Mantar protests, demonstrators reportedly turned to Bluetooth-based mesh communication applications that could facilitate communication between nearby devices without relying entirely on conventional mobile internet infrastructure.

The government’s concern was that such systems could make lawful interception, identification and investigation more difficult. According to reports, the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre issued directions seeking the removal of Bitchat, Briar and Bridgefy from major app stores and also sought action against Bitchat’s GitHub repository. Medianama reported that the notices provided intermediaries with three hours to comply, although officials later orally instructed companies not to enforce the directions.

ThePrint reported that the I4C notice to GitHub invoked Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act read with Rule 3(1)(d) of the IT Rules and sought removal of Bitchat’s repositories within three hours. There is a legitimate public-interest argument here. Communication technologies can be abused for criminal activity, and the State cannot be expected to remain completely powerless when technology is used to facilitate serious offences. But that cannot be the end of the analysis.

The fact that a technology can be misused does not establish that the technology itself should be suppressed. A telephone can be used to organise a crime. A messaging application can be used to coordinate violence. Social media can spread misinformation. None of these facts, by themselves, justify eliminating the technology. The State must still establish why the restriction is necessary, why less restrictive alternatives would not work and why the particular application or communication mechanism presents a sufficiently serious and demonstrable threat. Otherwise, “public order” becomes a justification capable of swallowing the right to communicate altogether.

The constitutional framework is not optional

India does not indulge this issue without constitutional guidance. Article 19(1)(a) guarantees freedom of speech and expression, while Article 19(2) permits reasonable restrictions on specified grounds. The Supreme Court’s decision in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India remains a foundational judgment in understanding the limits of online speech regulation.

The Court’s decision is important precisely because it recognises that vague or overbroad restrictions can have a chilling effect on legitimate expression. The existence of a statutory power, therefore, cannot by itself answer the constitutional question. The State must still demonstrate that the restriction falls within the law and survives constitutional scrutiny. That is particularly important where the restriction affects political expression.

Political speech lies at the heart of democratic participation. Criticism of government policy, reporting on protests, documenting police action and exposing administrative failures cannot be placed in the same category as genuinely unlawful material merely because they are inconvenient or controversial. The State must be able to distinguish speech that is unlawful from speech that is merely uncomfortable. That distinction is the foundation of a functioning democracy.

Another concern emerging from the reporting is the increasingly routine character of mechanisms originally justified by urgency. Emergency powers exist for a reason. There are situations in which authorities may need to act quickly to prevent serious and immediate harm. But emergency mechanisms become constitutionally dangerous when the exception starts functioning as the ordinary route for restricting speech.

Article 14 reported concerns among technology-policy experts that emergency blocking mechanisms could increasingly become part of routine online governance, particularly because affected parties may not receive the underlying orders and therefore have limited opportunities to challenge them. The constitutional problem can be stated simply. An emergency procedure should make the State faster when speed is genuinely necessary. It should not make the State less accountable because it has chosen to act quickly. If anything, extraordinary powers should trigger stronger review precisely because they reduce the opportunity for the affected person to respond beforehand.

Platforms are not innocent bystanders

The responsibility, however, does not rest with the government alone. Technology companies have enormous power over what citizens can see, publish and circulate. They therefore have their own obligations of transparency. The Indian Express reporting indicates that Meta generally provides users in several jurisdictions with information when governments request restrictions on their content, but that such disclosures are not provided in India and some other markets because of legal and regulatory considerations. That should concern anyone who believes that users have a right to understand why their speech has been restricted.

A platform should not be able to tell a journalist merely that their report is unavailable because of a “legal requirement”. The journalist should know whether the government ordered the restriction, which authority issued the order and which law was invoked. Transparency does not necessarily prevent compliance. A platform can comply with a lawful government direction while still informing the affected user that the government sought the restriction. Indeed, transparency may be one of the few mechanisms capable of ensuring that government censorship does not become invisible.

The reported proposal by X to make government requests more visible to users therefore deserves attention. According to recent reports, Elon Musk announced that X would begin making government requests to restrict or remove content more transparent, including information about the requesting authority and, where available, the legal basis for the request.

The Indian government has understandably maintained that platforms operating in India remain subject to Indian law. But that is not inconsistent with transparency. The two principles can coexist. If the State has lawfully ordered a restriction, there should be no reason for the process to remain invisible. Government censorship should not become anonymous censorship.

India must decide what kind of digital democracy it wants

There is a legitimate State interest in regulating harmful online material. There is a legitimate public interest in combating misinformation, incitement, deepfakes, threats and criminal coordination. Technology companies cannot claim absolute immunity from the laws of the countries in which they operate. But none of these propositions answers the central constitutional question.

How much power should the State possess to determine what citizens are allowed to see, publish and circulate — and what safeguards must accompany that power?

Nearly 1.95 lakh blocking directions in five months, as reported by The Indian Express, should force that question into the centre of India’s democratic debate. The answer cannot simply be that the government has followed a procedure. A procedure that is too fast to meaningfully challenge, too opaque to independently scrutinise and too automated to permit genuine review can satisfy the appearance of legality while undermining the substance of constitutional protection.

Indian law therefore needs stronger safeguards around government-directed content restrictions. Orders should clearly identify the legal provision relied upon, the authority issuing them and the reasons for restricting the particular material. Affected users should ordinarily receive notice and have access to a meaningful appeal mechanism. Emergency orders should be subject to prompt independent review and should automatically lapse unless their continuation is justified. Platforms should publish greater information about government requests, including anonymised data that allows the public to assess how frequently such powers are being used and how often they are challenged or withdrawn. Most importantly, the burden cannot silently shift from the State having to justify censorship to the citizen having to prove why their speech should remain online.

The extraordinary rise in takedown directions, the targeting of protest-related content, the restrictions imposed on journalists and news organisations, the attempt to interfere with decentralised communication tools and the increasing use of automated compliance together point towards a digital environment in which the speed of censorship may be outpacing the speed of accountability.

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The post The State Wants the Delete Button: India’s new architecture of digital censorship appeared first on SabrangIndia.

According to the data compiled by the Safai Karamchari Andolan, a civil society organisation working against Manual Scavenging – 101 sanitation workers have died cleaning sewers and septic tanks across India during the first 188 days of 2026, amounting to one death every 45 hours. The capital of India, Delhi NCR is alone accounted for 12 deaths. However, what constitutes a greater violation of human rights is the under-reporting of these deaths by the central government in order to evade liability. In an April 2026 through a release of the Press Information Bureau (PIB), the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment stated that, according to the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis, 317 sanitation workers had died due to hazardous cleaning of sewers and septic tanks between 2021 and 2025, the same release says that 89,248 sewer/septic tank workers had been profiled and validated under NAMASTE scheme. The State’s own numbers reveal a troubling contradiction: thousands of workers are recognised as performing hazardous sanitation work, yet the deaths arising from it remain strikingly few on paper. How, then, are these deaths being counted?

The state justifies this under-reporting by drawing a distinction between “cleaning human excreta” vs “accidents during the hazardous cleaning of sewers and septic tanks”, but for the worker who enters a sewer and never comes out, there is no such distinction. The major question that we as a society should ask is that when a person dies while manually cleaning a sewer, does the legal classification matter more than the death?

If carefully scrutinised, we can find that the section 2(d) of the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers Act, 2013 separately defines “hazardous cleaning”, whereas section 7 expressly prohibits employing or engaging a person for hazardous cleaning of a sewer or septic tank, and under Sec 33, the act doesn’t merely prohibit hazardous cleaning, it also says that local authorities and other agencies have a duty to use modern technology for cleaning sewers and septic tanks. The emphasis, therefore, should not merely be on providing protective gear to those entering these hazardous spaces, but on completely eliminating the need for human beings to enter them in the first place. Yet, despite the legislative mandate and technological alternatives, State instrumentalities continue to remain criminally silent.

In the case of Safai Karamchari Andolan & Ors. v. Union of India (2014), the Court recognised sewer deaths and directed compensation of Rs. 10 lakhs to the families of deceased workers, which was enhanced to Rs. 30 lakhs in Balram Singh v. Union of India (2023)

The documentary Kakkoos filmed in Tamil Nadu, a state which is said to have the highest number of Manual Scavengers, brings out another disturbing reality: the existence of legislation prohibiting dry latrines has not eliminated the conditions that continue to force people to manually handle human excreta. However, the practice extends far beyond the cleaning of latrines.

Garbage collectors, for instance, are often required to handle human excreta when waste from households of medical patients is disposed of in polythene bags and subsequently has to be removed by hand. In schools without adequate water or sanitation facilities, children may defecate and leave, leaving cleaners to remove the excreta with their bare hands. Yet, such workers are often not recognised as manual scavengers. Kakkoos therefore exposes the gap between the legal understanding of manual scavenging and the lived reality of those who, in one way or another, are compelled to handle human excreta.

However, the danger does not end with the indignity of the work. Manual scavengers are routinely exposed to hazardous gases such as hydrogen sulphide, carbon monoxide, ammonia and methane, with prolonged exposure causing respiratory and visual impairment, seizures and, in severe cases, death. Constant contact with human and animal excreta further exposes them to infections such as leptospirosis. Yet, for a community already pushed to the margins by caste and poverty, access to healthcare remains limited. The physical and mental toll of such work, coupled with poor living conditions and, in some cases, dependence on alcohol as a means of coping, only deepens a cycle of vulnerability that the State has a responsibility to break.

Manual scavenging, thus, is not only a blatant violation of the human rights bestowed upon an individual by virtue of birth, but also raises serious questions about social practices continued in society in the name of “tradition”. The practice is deeply rooted in the caste hierarchy, where a birth-given identity has historically determined the occupation and social position of an individual.

Yet, despite Article 17 of the Constitution abolishing untouchability in 1949, manual scavengers continue to remain among the most disadvantaged communities within the Dalit population, historically placed at the lowest rungs of the caste hierarchy as “Atishudras”. The fact that a birth-assigned tag can continue to determine who performs such inhumane work, decades after constitutional abolition, is perhaps the starkest illustration of the distance between what the law promises and what society continues to practice.

(The author is a law student at BMS College of Law, Bangalore)

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