Imagine sending your child to school in the morning. You pack whatever you can. You tell them to study hard. You believe — because what else do you have — that this school, this teacher, this building, represents a path forward.
Now imagine a video reaching your phone.
Your child. On the floor. Massaging a teacher’s feet.
This is not a hypothetical. This is Chitrakoot, Uttar Pradesh. This is a government primary school. And this is the headmistress, Madhu Kumari, captured in a 32-second clip — on a mat, relaxed, phone nearby — while a group of young girls, most aged between six and ten, kneel around her, rubbing her hands and feet during school hours.
The video did not come from a journalist. It did not come from an official inquiry. It came from someone who saw it, filmed it, and shared it — because some things cannot wait for a press conference.
What the Video Shows — and What It Does Not Show
Let us be precise.
The footage shows Madhu Kumari, headmistress of the school, reclining on a mat inside the school premises. Around her, several young girls are kneeling and rubbing her hands and feet. The school setting is identifiable — shelves, desks, the physical markers of a classroom.
The children are not playing. They are not doing an activity. They are performing a service — for a person in authority over them — during hours when they are supposed to be learning.
No one in the video appears to be supervising this in any official capacity. No teaching appears to be happening.
This is what the footage shows. Nothing has been added or interpreted.
What the footage does not show — and what a proper inquiry must establish — is how often this occurred, whether any child was coerced or distressed, and what the chain of supervision at this school looked like before the video surfaced.
These are not questions designed to soften what was filmed. They are questions that a functioning education department must answer — because the answers determine whether this was a rogue incident or a tolerated pattern.
The Defence That Does Not Hold
After the video began circulating, a perspective emerged in public discussion that deserves a direct response.
One online commenter — who did not wish to be identified — argued that this situation has been exaggerated. The argument made was that students often enjoy such tasks, and that children frequently volunteer for non-academic duties at school simply to avoid sitting in class. The analogy offered was of children volunteering to make decorations for Independence Day celebrations as a way of skipping lessons.
This comparison needs to be taken apart carefully, because it is not entirely without logic — and yet it arrives at the completely wrong conclusion.
Yes, children sometimes enjoy doing things other than sitting through lessons. Yes, volunteering for a school task is different from being instructed to perform one. The critical distinction is this: a child making paper flags for a school event is contributing to a collective, consensual, institution-approved activity. A child kneeling on a classroom floor to massage the personal limbs of their headmistress is none of those things.
One is a school tradition. The other is a child performing domestic service for an authority figure who controls their academic record, their attendance marks, and their daily experience of school life.
The power gap between a government school headmistress and a six-year-old from a poor family in rural UP is not subtle. It is absolute. And within that gap, the concept of a child “enjoying” or “volunteering” for this particular task needs to be examined with extraordinary care — not accepted at face value.
Children in positions of dependency comply. That is not the same as choosing.
The Remark That Cuts the Deepest
Another online source, speaking without attribution, put the situation with the kind of bluntness that formal commentary tends to avoid.
The observation was this: government servants of this kind — those who acquire even a small degree of institutional power — behave exactly as those who hold larger power have always behaved. The only difference is scale. Given more access, the same instinct would extend further. The same person who makes children massage her feet in a classroom, this commenter noted, would — if unchecked — find ways to bring that entitlement home.
It is a harsh observation. It is also not an unfair one.
The abuse of positional power over those with no recourse to challenge it is not unique to this school. It is not unique to this state. It is a pattern visible wherever accountability is absent and dependence is total.
The children in this classroom — many of them from Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe, and Other Backward Class backgrounds, according to reports accompanying the video — had no recourse. Their parents needed this school. These children needed this headmistress to not mark them absent, not fail them, not make their already difficult lives harder. That need is what made silence possible. That silence is what made the footage necessary.
Who These Children Are — and Why That Matters
Government primary schools in rural Uttar Pradesh serve India’s most economically vulnerable families. These are not schools with PTAs, active parent groups, and WhatsApp complaint chains. These are schools where a parent showing up to complain about a teacher risks the child being treated worse afterward.
That is the reality of institutional power in under-resourced, under-supervised government education.
The children in this video are not children with options. They are not children whose parents can pull them out and enroll them elsewhere. They are precisely the children that government schools were built to serve — and precisely the children who have the least ability to resist when the system turns against them.
This is why the caste dimension reported in discussions around the video is not a side issue. If the children being used as domestic help are disproportionately from the most marginalised communities, that is not incidental. That is a pattern with a name. And that pattern has laws against it — the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act exists precisely because this kind of subordination, this normalisation of service from the vulnerable to the powerful, has deep roots and does not stop on its own.
The district education officer, the Basic Shiksha Adhikari, and the state education department cannot treat this as a paperwork problem.
What the Law Says — and What Must Happen Now
India has a robust framework of laws protecting children in school settings. The Right to Education Act guarantees every child a safe, non-exploitative learning environment. The Juvenile Justice Act and POCSO provide protections against abuse. The Child Labour laws prohibit the engagement of children in work — including within institutional settings — when that work serves the personal interest of an authority figure rather than the child’s education.
Madhu Kumari’s alleged conduct, if confirmed by inquiry, falls clearly outside the boundaries of any legitimate school activity. An FIR should be registered. A departmental inquiry should be initiated independently. And the state education department should examine not just this school, but the supervisory mechanism that allowed this to go unaddressed until a video surfaced.
Because this did not happen in one day. Patterns like this take time to establish. They establish themselves when no one is watching, when no one is asking, and when the children involved have no way to be heard.
One particularly pointed observation circulated after the video spread: that the situation in government schools will not fundamentally change until the children of legislators and administrators are enrolled in the same institutions. Until the people who control the system have personal stakes in its quality, the incentive to maintain accountability remains theoretical.
That observation is uncomfortable precisely because it is accurate.
The Teacher Who Was Entrusted, and What That Means
A headmistress is not just an administrator. She is the person responsible for the tone, safety, and culture of an entire school. She is the model of adult authority that every child in that building encounters daily.
When that authority is used to extract personal comfort from six-year-olds during class hours, something fundamental has broken — not just in one school, but in the promise that the school represents.
The government school in rural India represents, for millions of families, the single most accessible pathway to a different life. It is the place where a child from a poor family can, in theory, build something. It requires of parents an act of faith — that the people inside that building will treat their children as students, not as resources.
That faith was betrayed in Chitrakoot on a school day when children who came to learn were made to kneel.
The inquiry must proceed. The action must be visible and documented. And the outcome must be public — because the families whose children attend that school, and schools like it across this country, deserve to see what accountability actually looks like when it arrives.
Not just the arrest. Not just the suspension. The full reckoning.
What Needs to Change — Right Now
The video is out. The outrage is real. But outrage has a short half-life if it does not produce structural change.
Here is what must follow:
- Immediate suspension of Madhu Kumari pending inquiry — standard procedure that protects both the children and the integrity of the investigation.
- FIR registration under applicable sections — including child labour provisions and, if caste targeting is confirmed, SC/ST prevention of atrocities provisions.
- District-level inspection of all government primary schools in Chitrakoot — this video suggests a supervisory vacuum that extends beyond one classroom.
- A functional grievance channel for children and parents — one that does not require the parent to confront the very teacher they are complaining about, and that offers meaningful protection from retaliation.
- Mandatory installation of functional CCTV in common areas of government schools — not as surveillance of children, but as accountability infrastructure for adults in positions of power.
India spends public money to run these schools. The children inside them are not servants of the state or its employees. They are the reason the system exists.
It is time the system remembered that.
Related Accountability Coverage
(Read the full story in our previous blog about the Nashik runner who was harassed on a morning run — and how a teenager’s own video forced the system to act within hours)
(Read our coverage on a Pune college campus incident where a father took matters into his own hands after the institution failed his daughter.)
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