Live India - Schoolteacher Sending Girl Students Into Prostitution 'expose'

Schoolteacher Sending Girl Students Into Prostitution 'expose'

On August 28, 2007, the channel aired a sting operation covering a porn racket run by a schoolteacher in Delhi involving school girls. A lady in Vivek Vihar, where the teacher Uma Khurana used to teach at a girl's school, gave the lead to the channel, after which the reporter, acting as a customer, fixed up a meeting with Mrs. Khurana at Cross River mall in late August. The footage aired shows Khurana negotiating a deal of Rs. 4,000 for the girl’s “services”. He paid Rs. 400 to her and she handed over the 15-year-old girl, an ex-student at her earlier school. Later, the girl was taken into confidence, and revealed that Khurana's method was to serve the students a drink laced with drugs after which she would take pictures of them in an obscene pose. These were later used by her to blackmail students into prostitution.

The day following the broadcast, a crowd of several hundred people gathered at the school. After burning a police van parked nearby, they entered the school premises, pulled the teacher out of the teacher's room, and thrashed her badly.

This led to calls for sting operations being curtailed. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which has been trying to stifle sting operations, especially against politicians, said that “It should have been left to the police to take action against the accused.”

Meanwhile, the role of Live India, the channel which aired the sting is being scrutinised by the police. The police had arrested, Khurana, a teacher at the Government Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya's Daryaganj branch, after the mob violence on Thursday.

But the police and parents claim that the channel's approach in broadcasting the expose was wrong. It is believed the channel had conducted the sting over a month back, when Khurana was a teacher at the Vivek Vihar branch of the school.