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The Associated Management of Primary and Secondary Schools in Karnataka (KAMS) has called for a separate law to protect teachers and educational institutions from violence and damage, in line with the laws protecting medical and legal professions.
Karnataka is not alone. In Tamil Nadu, the School Voice Association of Private Schools has made similar demands, with more than 900 educationists reportedly participating in the conference where the proposal was adopted. In Telangana, following the killing of a private-school principal, the Telangana Recognised School Managements Association has called for a comprehensive Teachers and Schools Protection Act covering assault, threats, intimidation and unlawful entry into schools.
While these demands do not, by themselves, establish a wider crisis in Indian schooling, they still warrant careful consideration. Although scattered across newspaper reports, these incidents from various parts of the country are difficult to ignore. In West Bengal in August 2026, the father of a Class XI student allegedly attacked a teacher with a belt after the teacher had reprimanded students for indiscipline. In Ahmedabad in June 2025, a disagreement over when a school-leaving certificate would be available allegedly escalated into a parent attacking a clerk-cum-teacher with a knife.
Although the immediate issue is teacher safety, a broader policy question remains: how can teachers exercise legitimate professional authority while remaining accountable and protected when their decisions are challenged?
Recent incidents also suggest that the problem is not confined to parent–teacher conflict. In Ludhiana, a Class XI student allegedly assaulted his government-school principal after a disciplinary reprimand, while in Andhra Pradesh a Class X student allegedly punched a teacher following a routine reprimand. The Telangana police recently arrested two 16-year-olds for murdering their school principal. While these cases do not establish a national trend, they underline that teacher safety concerns can arise from both students and parents.
Although the immediate issue is teacher safety, a broader policy question remains: how can teachers exercise legitimate professional authority while remaining accountable and protected when their decisions are challenged?
The Gaps in Teacher Safety Data
This concern was raised in 2018 when a Lok Sabha question asked for State/Union Territory-wise data on physical attacks against teachers and whether a special law was being considered to ensure teachers’ workplace safety. The Union government said that “sporadic and isolated” incidents of this kind were reported but that the Ministry did not maintain the relevant statistics centrally. It added that no special protection law was then under consideration.
Eight years later, patchy media reports of individual incidents tell us that the problem exists, but not whether it is growing, how frequently it occurs, whether public- and private-school teachers face different risks, or which kinds of school disputes are most likely to escalate.
The prominence of private-school associations in the present debate should therefore not lead to the assumption that this is exclusively a private-school concern. Government-school teachers may encounter different vulnerabilities, including local political or community pressures. Without systematic data, meaningful comparison is impossible.
Moreover, physical assault may be only the most visible end of the spectrum. International research on parent aggression against teachers suggests that disputes commonly involve discipline, grades and services, but are also shaped by mistrust, communication failures, school policies and the degree of administrative support available to teachers. Several studies document insults, name-calling and derogatory language as the most frequently reported forms of aggression against teachers, and record their negative impact on teacher well-being and life satisfaction. These studies mainly examine parent and student aggression through a wider school-climate framework, rather than treating each confrontation as a dispute between one parent and one teacher.
This distinction is important. The ability to challenge grades, question disciplinary action, report humiliating treatment or seek an investigation into alleged misconduct reflects greater awareness of child rights and autonomy in education. However, the right to raise such concerns does not extend to intimidating, abusing or victimising teachers.
The policy question is how institutions can create a credible boundary between the two.
Professional Authority Is Not Immunity
Any argument for stronger teacher authority must address teacher accountability. Issues such as corporal punishment, student humiliation and arbitrary disciplinary practices have no legitimate place in schools, and teachers should be accountable for how they exercise their authority.
Professional authority means something quite different: it means that teachers must possess sufficient discretion to organise learning, assess students, establish classroom expectations and make reasonable pedagogical and disciplinary judgements within a transparent set of rules. Teacher professionalism is closely linked to teacher autonomy, which allows teachers to draw on their knowledge, practical expertise and professional discretion, sustained through trust and ethical relationships with students and communities.
Therefore, professional authority has at least three dimensions: discretion to exercise judgement, legitimacy in the eyes of students and parents, and institutional support when that judgement is contested. Weakness in any one of the three can undermine the others.
Professional authority has at least three dimensions: discretion to exercise judgement, legitimacy in the eyes of students and parents, and institutional support when that judgement is contested. Weakness in any one of the three can undermine the others.
The current ambitions of the National Education Policy 2020 to achieve competency-based education, inquiry, discussion and collaboration depend critically on the voice, agency and autonomy of teachers. These are inherently judgement-intensive activities. For instance, a teacher facilitating discussion must decide when disagreement becomes disruption, and responding to different learning needs requires adaptation chosen by the teacher. Some studies of the Indian school system describe teachers as occupying a seemingly contradictory position: culturally valued, yet often institutionally constrained by administrative expectations and a persistent “culture of compliance”. This suggests that while teachers may have substantial autonomy over what happens inside the classroom, they have much less confidence that reasonable, professional decisions will receive institutional backing if they are challenged outside it.
Strengthening Protection Within Existing Law
Physical assault, criminal intimidation and trespass are already punishable under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023. The case for a separate teacher-specific criminal offence therefore requires evidence that existing criminal law is either inadequate in scope or ineffective in practice. In medical provisions, states have justified special protection on the basis that repeated violence was disrupting medical services and therefore creating a wider public-interest problem.
The takeaway is that a special law is justified only if the problem is more than assault on an individual, and if violence, intimidation or interference systematically obstructs the performance of an essential professional function and ordinary law is failing to deal with that problem.
The takeaway is that special law is justified only if the problem extends beyond assault on an individual, with violence, intimidation or interference systematically obstructing the performance of an essential professional function and ordinary law failing to address it.
India should not immediately create a new teacher-specific criminal offence for assault, particularly when violence, intimidation and trespass are already covered under existing criminal law.
However, the 1966 Recommendation concerning the Status of Teachers, issued by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), states that teachers should be protected from “unfair or unwarranted interference by parents” in matters that fall within their professional responsibility, while requiring clear procedures through which complaints can be raised and teachers are given a fair opportunity to respond.
South Korea has a Special Act that protects teachers from crimes as well as certain forms of unjustified interference with teaching, such as repeatedly filing complaints without legitimate purpose or persistently demanding things outside a teacher’s legal duties. The Philippines, for its part, offers public-school teachers safeguards in disciplinary proceedings and expressly recognises academic freedom in the discharge of professional duties, particularly in teaching and classroom methods. While South Korea’s law is stronger, both laws recognise and protect teachers’ professional discretion and give them procedural protection when their conduct is formally challenged.
The objective should be to protect discretion, safeguard teachers’ ability to teach and make reasonable professional judgements, while preserving equally strong accountability mechanisms when that authority is misused.
India should not immediately create a new teacher-specific criminal offence for assault, particularly when violence, intimidation and trespass are already covered under existing criminal law. However, it should first build a national evidence base, examine the revised ILO/UNESCO standard, which is due in 2027, and develop a framework aligned with workplace safety norms that protects legitimate educational activity from intimidation while preserving clear routes for complaints and accountability. The objective should be to protect discretion, safeguard teachers’ ability to teach and make reasonable professional judgements, while preserving equally strong accountability mechanisms when that authority is misused.
Arpan Tulsyan is a Senior Fellow with the Centre for New Economic Diplomacy at the Observer Research Foundation.
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