A 12-year-old student of a Delhi government school committed suicide by hanging herself from a ceiling fan at her home in Khayala area of west Delhi on Saturday after returning from Parents-Teacher Meeting (PTM) as she was scolded by her mother for being weak in studies.
The Class 7 student, Karishma, had accompanied her mother Shahjahan to the government senior secondary school in the morning where she was a student to attend the PTM. At the school, teachers complained her mother about her weakness in studies and was scolded by her mother, said a senior police officer. The girl, after coming to her house at JJ Colony in Khayala, confined herself to a room and hanged herself from a ceiling fan at around 12.30 pm, said the officer.
“We got the call about the suicide at around 12.45 pm. A police team recovered the body of the girl and sent it for post-mortem. Preliminary inquiries hint that the girl might have taken the extreme step due to her helplessness and humiliation,” said the officer. Inquest proceedings have been started under Section 174 to enquire about the incident, he added.
The girl belonged to a financially weak family and her father, Nawab, worked as a daily wager, the police said.
Parents of around 16 lakh students studying in over 2,500 government schools in the national capital on Saturday attended the “mega PTM” organised to bring the quality of education at par with that imparted in private schools.
Taking cognisance of the incident, deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia has ordered a magisterial inquiry into the matter.
Expressing his deep sorrow over the suicide of the girl, Delhi BJP president Satish Upadhyay said that this suicide is the result of the Delhi government’s insistence on making PTM a political mega show.
Mr Upadhyay said that the government should take a lesson from this incident and that it should not frame programmes for political gain without proper planning. “For the last 35 years, PTMs are being held in the government schools of Delhi. Today, the Kejriwal government organised a mega PTM in the government schools of Delhi but the teachers were not counselled for this mega show. It became a day of complaints against the children because the teachers were not trained enough to handle these situations and it appears over-complaining became the reason behind the suicide by the sensitive girl,” added Mr Upadhyay.
