In July, Bangalore was up in arms against sexual offenders after a particularly troubling case of a child being molested while at school. But the anger that was seen on the streets and on social media that week has long since dissipated. What remains are periodic updates in the newspapers of how the Bangalore police are trying to implement new safety norms and how schools are resisting them.

Bangalore is growing at a frantic pace, with an estimated 800 to 1,000 people migrating into the city every day. Over the last five years, traffic has become a lot worse, the crime rate has risen and the number of private primary schools has quadrupled.

There were 732 private primary schools in the city at the time of the eighth All India School Education Survey in 2009. Last year, this number had risen to 2,939, reported Karnataka's Department of Public Instruction. The allegation that a six-year-old girl had been raped on the premises of Vibgyor, an upscale private school in Marathahalli, jarred Bangaloreans into the realisation that the city has no mechanism to monitor how private and government schools function, and who they hire.

Flurry of protests

This alleged sexual assault triggered a flurry of protests. Parents picketed the school because they were worried and angry that it had hushed up the incident. Several groups were hurriedly set up on Facebook to organise rallies around the city. Kannada groups even brought the IT city to a standstill for a day, declaring a bandh as they took out their own rally on behalf of the city's women and children. Bangalore was doubly shocked by the rape of a young woman in a car that same week.

A few days after the Vibgyor school rape was reported,  former Bangalore Police Commissioner Raghavendra Auradkar met a group of protesters in Bangalore’s Freedom Park. No arrests had been made in the case and there was no known progress in the investigation. To a barrage of questions, Auradkar had a single answer – the police were going to do everything they could to resolve the case and ensure the safety of women. The fact that nothing had been done yet resulted in Auradkar being transferred from the post a few days later.

The new commissioner MN Reddi almost immediately set up a Twitter account, @CPBlr. The city police also issued a nine-point guideline for all schools to implement by the end of August. These included ID cards for parents who picked their children up from school, having all school staff registered with local police, CCTVs in all classrooms, and buses and vigilance officers in glass cabins on every floor of the school building.

Apart from installing CCTVs, which requires some money, the guidelines are quite practical to implement, say child rights and education activists in the city. However, the road to implementing these norms is passing though a maze of confusion. For one, the Department of Public Instruction issued a 70-point list which has some very impractical requirements and many schools don’t know which set of rules they must follow.

Several schools have started setting up systems according to the police rules. Other schools have resisted saying they need another three months to implement the police guidelines. The police insist that apart from installing CCTVs, which needs time and money, their other directives can be put in place at once. But besides the lack of time, many disagree with the rationale behind some of the rules.

“Why should your name be with the police station just because you are a teacher here?” asked Victor Tauro, national coordinator of the India Literacy Project, who worries that this will amount to putting all the city’s teachers under observation. “An identity card, verified address and previous employment check should be with the school. The school should be responsible if they don’t provide data when the police asks for it.”

Schools also protested against having to verify their teachers with the police at a fee of Rs 1,000 per staff member. The police reduced the fee to Rs 250. Many schools went back to the police asking that the person being verified pay the fee and not school managements.

In the middle of the back-and-forth and speculation that a whole new set of guidelines would be issued, the police surprised everyone by charging 186 schools for non-compliance of their guidelines. The Commissioner of the Department of Public Instruction objected to government schools being booked, saying that the government had no money to make the changes.

Education activist Kathyayini Chamraj, the founder of the Bangalore non-profit initiative CIVIC, says the government’s position is a farce: though there have been incidents of sexual assault reported in government schools, public education officials are refusing to take responsibility for children in their own schools. “At least they can fulfil the norms under the RTE Act that ask for a compound wall and separate toilets for girls and boys,” she said. "Without toilets, girls are walking out of the school at any time. Boys are walking in and out any time. There’s no compound wall, gate or watchman. The school authorities are not at all being responsible for the children.”

Sex-offenders database 

Much of Bangalore has gone on to worrying about other things – daylight muggings in posh neighbourhoods, the bad behaviour of auto drivers, the ice bucket challenge. Parents of school children are still looking for ways to keep their kids safe. The Namma Bengaluru Foundation recently partnered with a group of parents of the Vibgyor school to launch a Child Safe Bengaluru campaign. A major demand of the campaign is that the government look into creating a sex-offenders database along the lines of systems set up in the US, UK or Canada. “The accused who was thereafter let go on insufficient evidence had a history of child abuse,” said Sridhar Pabbisetty, CEO of the foundation. "But the previous school he was at just gave him warnings and let him go without ever reporting it."

The foundation is building a federation of parent associations to take up the task of monitoring structures for safety in schools. Pabbisetty reasons that parents who have the most at stake will do a better job of it than the already under-staffed and overburdened police force or education department.

While the police are standing tough for now, no one in Bangalore is quite sure if any of these measures will make Bangalore schools safer. “For a long time there has been a regulation on transport operators for schools," Pabbisetty said. "That has never been implemented, just because of lack of will. It has cost implications but at the same time we cannot allow 15 children to be stuffed into a Maruti van and sent out. We have to have social norms of what is an acceptable way of treating our children.”