Parental Terror

Few nations revere education like India does. Academic success is often seen not merely as a virtue, but as the sole passport to social mobility, family honour and economic salvation. But when reverence turns into mania, it has fatal consequences. In Maharashtra’s Sangli district, a bright young life was extinguished not by poverty or accident, but by that most grotesque distortion of parental care: a father’s wrath over test scores.

17-year-old Sadhana Bhonsle had done everything a student is supposed to do. She had secured an enviable 92.6 percent in her Class 10 board exams. She was preparing, with the usual diligence for NEET - that dreaded gateway to a seat in medical college. Then she scored poorly in a mock test. This utterly routine ‘stumble’ in any rigorous academic process triggered a fatal beating by her father, himself a schoolteacher. He thrashed her with a stick so brutally that she died of head injuries before treatment could even begin.

The horror lies not only in the violence but in its cultural context. This is not merely the story of a deranged father but the endpoint of a society that has normalised violence in the name of discipline, that equates a child’s worth with their rank, and that treats a competitive entrance exam as a secular reckoning of destiny.

India’s exam system is famously brutal. The NEET alone is a monster, with millions of students registering for it each year, vying for fewer than 100,000 seats - less than 5 percent of them in government colleges. Coaching centres are bloated industries. Family savings are depleted for prep classes and relocation. Children are taken out of schools to focus solely on NEET. And then, when a mock test score does not meet expectations, even those who once scored over 90 percent are branded ‘failures.’

That a schoolteacher, a supposed shaper of minds, could kill his own daughter over an academic ‘misstep’ is both a personal and institutional failure.

There are precedents aplenty. In Kota, Rajasthan, - the country’s coaching capital - dozens of students die by suicide each year under the burden of expectations.

This must stop. Exam reforms are needed. More urgently, there must be a cultural reckoning about parenting, punishment and misplaced ambition. The state must prosecute the guilty parent from Sangli with the full weight of the law. But India must also prosecute an educational culture that leaves no room for failure, no tolerance for deviation, and no mercy for children needing space to grow.

Sadhana Bhonsle is not just a victim. She is a mirror reflecting a grotesque, deformed ideal of success that shuns joy and emotional wellbeing in favour of mechanical excellence at any cost. Until that ideal is smashed, more children will die. And many more will live crippled lives in its shadow.