india

Updated: Sep 18, 2019 03:15 IST

About 150 students of a government school in Uttar Pradesh’s Hardoi were lathi-charged by the police on Tuesday morning when they were on their way to the residence of district magistrate Pulkit Khare to complain about the poor conditions at their school and hostel, the students said.

The students of the social welfare department-run Ashram Paddatti Vidyalaya in Shahabad, Hardoi said they were forcibly taken to the Behta Gokul police station, where they were detained for around half-an-hour and beaten up. According to Class 11 student Shivam, who was a part of the group and got hurt, “around nine students suffered injuries” in the lathi-charge.

After being released by the police in the afternoon, the students went to the DM’s residence where they were assured by Khare that an inquiry had been set up to look into their complaints about their school and hostel conditions. The probe team is submit its findings within three days. Until the last reports came in, there was no action on the police use of force on the children, who were aged from 10 to 16 years, according to Shivam.

Superintendent of police (SP), Hardoi, Ashok Priyadarshi, denied use of force on children and called them rowdy. “The protest was sponsored. These rowdy elements wanted to disturb the event of minister in-charge Satish Mahana who was in Hardoi,” he said.

Station house officer (SHO) of the Behta Gokul police station, Rakesh Anand, said the students hit themselves. “They were not lathi-charged. They hit themselves with a brick on the head to create a scene,” he said.

The students asserted that the conditions at their school had become “unbearable”. They claimed that the food they got was substandard and they had not been given their books till date.

They decided to undertake the 40 km march to the DM’s residence and complain to him about the conditions. But barely 15 km into the march, they said, the police intercepted them.

They said additional SP Trigun Bisen and sub-divisional magistrate Hardoi Rakesh Vashishtha, accompanied by heavy police force, stopped them near the Behta Gokul and brought them to the police station. When they remained firm on meeting the DM, the police, allegedly locked the entrance gate and thrashed the students. The school principal, Sushil Dutt, could not be contacted for comment.