A woman in India was sentenced to life in prison after she was found guilty of killing her teen daughter for lying about scoring good marks despite failing her exams.
Bhimaneni Padmini Rani, 59, from Bengaluru in the southern state of Karnataka, stabbed her 17-year-old daughter, Sahiti Shivapriya, multiple times on 29 April 2024.
Sahiti was under pressure to perform in her second year Pre-University Course (PUC) examinations, which are equivalent to A-levels in the UK, but she failed five tests.
However, she told her mother she had passed the exam with 95 per cent marks.
A heated argument broke out between the two after the teenager told her mother that she failed one subject and blamed Rani for not supporting her.
Rani who told her relatives that her daughter was likely to set a seat in a US university was furious when she learned that Sahiti failed five exams, not one, upon calling one of her daughter’s friends. “I had boasted to my brothers and other relatives that Shaiti scored 95 per cent [score] and was set to fly to the US for higher studies,” she was quoted as saying in the chargesheet filed by the police, according to Times of India.
“If they would have come to know of the reality, I would have to face humiliation,” she said, adding that she also decided to kill herself. Rani was injured in the incident but recovered after receiving treatment at a hospital.
The incident was the latest example of the punishing academic culture in India, where failure is seen as a form of disgrace within communities.
The latest National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data for 2022 reports that 13,044 students died by suicide in India in 2021 alone, accounting for 7.6 per cent of total suicides that year.
The rate of student suicides in India has been rising alarmingly year after year, outpacing both the country’s population growth and broader suicide trends, according to data.
A report based on NCRB data revealed that students’ suicides have grown at a rate of 4 per cent, double the national average, over past two decades.
“The incidence of student suicides continues to surpass both population growth rates and overall suicide trends. Over the last decade, while the population of 0-24-year-olds reduced from 582 million to 581 million, the number of student suicides increased from 6,654 to 13,044,” the report compiled by IC3 institute said.
