Teacher forces students to clean school toilets in Tamil Nadu’s Tiruvallur.

CHENNAI: A new controversy has erupted over a government school in Thiruvallur district where girl students were forced to clean toilets. The event came days after four girl students committed suicide in Vellore after being scolded by teachers for poor performance.

A video of a weeping girl student cleaning the toilets with a piece of cloth was widely circulated via WhatsApp. In the video, a girl student in uniform scrubbing a toilet floor can be heard asking another girl to fetch some water and pour it on the floor.

After the suicide of four girl students on Friday, this is the third incident of teachers allegedly abusing the students that has come to light.

The toilet-cleaning incident happened at the RM Jain Government Girls Higher Secondary School which has over 1,000 students. 

“The headmistress of the school has forced girls to clean the toilets with bare hands. If the students refuse to clean, they were asked to kneel down and were hit on the head. Most of the students were under severe stress because of the humiliation meted out to them by the headmistress,” N Dinesh, Thiruvallur district secretary of Students Federation of India who had complained to the district collector in this regard.

The chief educational officer of the Thiruvallur district told DNA that his officials conducted an enquiry on the complaint and forwarded the report to the higher authorities to initiate action against the school. “We spoke to the girl students who appeared in the video. They told us that HM asked them to clean the toilets,” the official said.