MANGALURU: Bishop Aloysius Paul D’Souza of Mangalore on Saturday condemned the frequent incidents of corporal punishment meted out to the students in the Catholic Educational Institutions in Dakshina Kannada.
Replying to a query at a press conference on why there are repeated incidents of corporal punishments, which is a violation under RTE Act, the bishop who is also head of all catholic institutions run by Mangalore Diocese stressed that such incidents are considered ‘serious’. “Diocese runs 342 institutions.
Though such incidents are stray in nature but we consider them as serious. Whenever there were violations of the RTE Act, we have acted upon it once it was brought to our notice,” he added.
In the past one year, there were three incidents of priests and a nun beating students when they failed to perform their academic work, reported The Times of India.
Last year in April, a 12-year-old boy was beaten up by Fr Andrew D’Costa as the boy who was preparing for first communion failed to answer some of the Bible related questions.
Three months ago, Fr Vishal Monis, assistant parish priest and principal of St Anne English Medium School, Kelrai in Neermarga, was booked for assault and under Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. The victim, a high school student alleged that the priest beat him with cable wire for not doing homework and the priest also abused his caste.
In the first week of January, 2017, a Catholic Nun and a teacher at St Victor’s School in Puttur, admitted her fault to the Department of Public Instruction that she thrashed a LKG student with stick when the kids failed to answer a question.