New Delhi: The Supreme Court Friday sought responses from the Madhya Pradesh government, the Council for Indian School Certificate Examinations (ICSE), and an Indore-based private school while agreeing to hear a plea challenging the expulsion of a 13-year-old student over memes posted on a private Instagram account. The matter will be taken up next 13 February.
A top court bench comprising Justices B. V. Nagarathna and Ujjal Bhuyan issued the notice after a journalist father moved the apex court through a Special Leave Petition (SLP) against a Madhya Pradesh High Court judgment that upheld his son’s expulsion from his school.
The Supreme Court will now examine whether a school’s power to enforce discipline can outweigh a child’s fundamental rights to education, dignity, and privacy in the digital era.
The case
The dispute began on 4 February 2025, when a Class IX student of Little Wonders Convent School was accused of running a private Instagram account that posted memes about teachers.
The petitioner, Jitendra Singh Yadav, alleges that following the discovery of the account, a computer teacher physically slapped the child and conducted an unauthorised “raid” at the family’s residence.
According to the plea, the teacher illegally accessed a mobile phone registered in the name of the boy’s mother, hacked into the private Instagram account, and linked it to his own official credentials. It is further alleged that the school coerced three students into giving “botched-up” written confessions under the threat of immediate rustication, despite extraction logs indicating that the account user was a Class XI student—two grades higher than the petitioner’s son.
ThePrint has reached out to the school over email. This report will be updated if and when we receive a response.
Child Rights Commission order ignored
Following the incident, the school issued a transfer certificate branding the 13-year-old as having “bad character”, a remark that was withdrawn only after initial legal proceedings.
On 3 April 2025, the Madhya Pradesh State Commission for Protection of Child Rights (MPSCPCR) ordered the school to take the student back. The school management, however, refused to follow the order, leading the petitioner to file a case before the Madhya Pradesh High Court.
On 4 November 2025, a division bench of the high court dismissed the appeal, noting that bringing the child back would disturb a “congenial academic atmosphere” and that a “deterrent message” was required for other students.
Challenging this ruling, the petitioner has argued that the decision is “grossly disproportionate” and violates the Right to Free and Compulsory Education under Article 21A of the Constitution. The plea also points out that no forensic examination, IP tracking, or formal investigation was carried out to determine which of the three students had actually created the disputed content.
It also raises the question of whether a school has the authority to act as a censoring body and hack into parents’ private devices to penalise actions undertaken in a private digital space.
‘Impact on academic future’
The petition highlights that under the ICSE system, Classes IX and X constitute a two-year integrated course. As a result, expelling a student mid-session makes it nearly impossible for him to secure admission elsewhere for Class X, thereby jeopardising his ability to appear for board examinations and effectively “dooming” his academic future.
The plea further notes that the child was already grappling with aggression and emotional distress following the sudden death of his elder brother (also a student of the same school) just a year earlier.
According to the petitioner, the boy maintained near-perfect attendance and had an otherwise clean conduct record. Also, alleging that the school acted in an excessively high-handed manner, the boy’s lawyer argued that allowing educational institutions to function like “investigative authorities” would set a bad precedent.
(Edited by Viny Mishra)
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