Lalitpur, May 25 :

Forced closure of schools due to various political or educational reasons is the most frequent cause of violation of children’s right to education.

Of the total 33 violations of children’s right education documented by Partnerships for Protection in Armed Conflict (PPCC) from August 2005 to February 2006 in six districts, 16 cases were related with bandh or forced closure.

According to PPCC’s monitoring in Banke, Bara, Bardiya, Dang, Surkhet and Kailali, bandh affected all 2,103 schools in the districts and disrupted education of over one million students in these districts. The PPCC recorded a total number of 521 students abducted during the documentation period. However, all of them have been reported to be released afterwards. The abductions, for the Maoist indoctrination classes, ranged from one to three days.