A nine-year-old girl came second in her school exams. Her stepbrother came first. She was so afraid of how this would be received at home that she did something desperate. She altered the marksheet. She changed her rank to first and her brother’s to second. A child. Nine years old. So terrified of not being first that she tampered with a piece of paper.
When her father found out, he killed her.
He used a tree-cutting machine. Then he wrapped her body in a saree. Then he set it on fire. Then he told people it was an accident — that she had been trapped inside during a blaze.
The girl’s name was Anamika. She was nine. She lived in Deulgaon Raje village in Daund tehsil, Pune district.
On the afternoon of May 3, 2026, at around 3 pm, her father, Shantaram Duryodhan Chavan, killed her inside their home at Hanuman Wasti. He has been arrested. His partner, Chinki Bhonsle, who allegedly failed to report the crime, has also been arrested. The body has been sent to Sassoon Hospital for DNA testing and post-mortem examination.
This case has caused widespread outrage across Maharashtra. And it should. But the outrage, if it stays focused only on the father and the brutality of his act, will miss the point entirely. Because the most disturbing detail in this case is not what the father did. It is what the child did. She altered a marksheet. A nine-year-old girl was so afraid of coming second that she tried to change reality on paper. That fear did not come from nowhere. We put it there. Society put it there.
What Happened in Deulgaon Raje
Anamika was the daughter of Shantaram Chavan’s first marriage. She lived with her father, his partner Chinki Bhonsle, and her stepbrother Sanskar. When school exam results came out recently, Sanskar secured the first rank. Anamika came second. According to police, the girl was taunted about her result.
Upset and humiliated, she reportedly altered her stepbrother’s marksheet, changing his marks so that her rank would appear higher.
When Shantaram discovered the tampering, he flew into a rage. On the afternoon of May 3, he allegedly attacked Anamika with a wood-cutting machine — variously described in reports as a chainsaw, an electric saw, and a tree-cutting machine. The child died on the spot from severe injuries. After the killing, the father wrapped her body in cloth, placed it inside the house, and set the house on fire. When neighbours and authorities arrived, he claimed his daughter had been trapped inside during an accidental blaze.
Police received specific information suggesting foul play. They recovered the partially burnt body from the house. The remains have been sent for forensic analysis. Both Shantaram Chavan and Chinki Bhonsle are now in custody. A case has been registered at Daund Police Station under relevant sections of law. The investigation is ongoing.
The Marksheet She Changed
Every report about this case leads with the father’s violence. The chainsaw. The fire. The cover-up. And yes, the violence is horrifying beyond words. But I keep going back to one detail: the marksheet.
A child who comes second in class should be celebrated. Second is extraordinary. Second means you tried and nearly won. In most countries, second would be met with pride, encouragement, and a hug. But not in this house. And, if we are honest with ourselves, not in most Indian houses either.
Not really. We say we want our children to learn. But what we actually want is for them to be first. And children, who are far more perceptive than we give them credit for, know this. They know when love is conditional on performance. They know when approval is earned through rank, not effort. Anamika knew.
She was nine years old, and she already understood the rules of the game. She understood that first was acceptable and second was not. She understood it so deeply that she chose to forge a marksheet rather than go home with the truth. Think about what that means. A child chose deception over honesty because honesty felt more dangerous. And in this case, it was. Honesty killed her.
The Numbers We Do Not Talk About at Parent-Teacher Meetings
Anamika’s case is extreme. A father who kills his daughter over marks is not the norm. But the culture that produced the fear she felt? That is the norm. And the data proves it.
According to the latest NCRB report, 13,892 students died by suicide in India in 2023. That is the highest number in a decade. Students now account for 8.1% of all suicide deaths in the country. Of these, 1,303 were children below the age of 18 who took their own lives specifically because of failure in examinations. Maharashtra — the state where Anamika was killed — topped the list with 2,046 student suicides. In 2022, the number was 13,044 students, with 2,095 deaths linked directly to exam failure across all age groups. Maharashtra again led with 378 exam-failure suicides, followed by Madhya Pradesh at 277.
In Kota, Rajasthan — India’s coaching capital, where lakhs of students prepare for engineering and medical entrance exams — 29 students died by suicide in 2023 alone. Twenty-nine young people in one city, in one year, killed not by disease or accident but by a system that told them their entire worth was tied to a rank.
A study published in *The Lancet Regional Health* in 2024 noted that suicide due to exam failure is reported far more frequently in Asian countries than in Western ones, and linked this directly to cultures where academic excellence is equated with personal and family honour.
These are not fringe cases. This is a pattern. A culture-wide, generation-deep pattern in which a child’s value is measured in marks and a parent’s pride is measured in ranks.
And when the marks fall short, the consequences range from emotional withdrawal to physical violence to, in the most extreme cases, death.
The violence does not always come from the parent. Often, it comes from the child, directed inward.
The Culture We Built and Refuse to Examine
India is a country where a child’s report card is a family event. Where relatives ask, “Kitne aaye?” before they ask, “Kaise ho?” Where the first question after a board exam is not “How do you feel?” but “What did you score?” Where tuition starts in Class 1 and entrance coaching starts in Class 6, and the word “failure” is spoken about children the way other cultures speak about moral defects.
This is not about poverty. This is not about lack of access to education. This is about what we have decided education means. We have turned learning into a tournament.
We have told children that the only position that matters is the top one, and everything else is a variation of losing. We have built school systems that rank, sort, and display children in order of performance — on notice boards, in assemblies, in parent WhatsApp groups. And then we act surprised when a nine-year-old girl is so desperate to be first that she forges a marksheet. We built the fear. She just responded to it.
The National Education Policy of 2020 acknowledged this problem. It spoke about reducing the emphasis on rote learning, introducing competency-based assessment, and replacing rigid board exams with more flexible, multiple-opportunity testing. Some of this has begun. Supplementary exams have been introduced, and in 2023, over 1.27 lakh students appeared for them. But the cultural shift that the NEP envisions is far from reality. In most Indian homes, the dinner-table conversation after exam results has not changed. The question is still: “What rank?” And the only acceptable answer is still: “First.”
What This Case Tells Us
Shantaram Chavan is a violent man who killed his child. That is a criminal act, and the law will deal with it. But Anamika’s fear — the fear that made her alter a marksheet at the age of nine — that is not criminal. That is cultural. That is something we have collectively created. We created it every time we compared one child to another. Every time we celebrated rank instead of learning. Every time we made a child feel that being second was the same as being nothing.
Anamika came second. She was nine years old. She lived in a village in Pune district. She liked school enough to care about her marks. She cared about her marks enough to be afraid of them. And she was afraid enough to change a piece of paper, hoping that if the paper said first, she might be safe.
She was not safe.
The father who killed her will be prosecuted. But the culture that made a nine-year-old girl fear second place? That will continue. It will continue in the coaching centres of Kota and the living rooms of South Delhi and the parent-teacher meetings of every school in every city in this country. It will continue until we decide that a child is more than a number on a marksheet. Until we decide that second is not failure. Until we decide that learning matters more than rank.
Anamika cannot wait for that change. She is gone. But the next child sitting in a classroom right now, terrified of bringing home a report card that says second, is still alive. The question is what we do before their fear becomes another headline.
References
- Free Press Journal — “Pune Crime: Father Allegedly Kills 9-Year-Old Daughter With Chainsaw Over School Marks Dispute” (May 7, 2026). https://www.freepressjournal.in
- Free Press Journal — “Pune Horror: Daund Man Arrested For Killing 9-Year-Old Daughter Over School Result” (May 5, 2026). https://www.freepressjournal.in
- Daily Pioneer — “She Came Second: Father Allegedly Kills Daughter Over Marksheet Tampering in Pune” (May 8, 2026). https://dailypioneer.com
- The Logical Indian — “Pune Horror: Father Allegedly Kills 9-Year-Old Daughter After Tampering Of Brother’s School Marksheet” (May 8, 2026). https://thelogicalindian.com
- Pune Pulse — “Pune Horror: Father Kills 9-Year-Old Daughter With An Electric Saw Over Marksheet Dispute” (May 6, 2026). https://www.mypunepulse.com
- Punekar News — “Pune: Father Kills 9-Year-Old Daughter over Minor Dispute, Sets House Ablaze” (May 6, 2026). https://www.punekarnews.in
- Careers360 — “Over 13,800 student suicide deaths in 2023, highest in 10 years: NCRB report” (September 30, 2025). https://news.careers360.com
- The Lancet Regional Health — “Exam Failure Suicides and Policy Initiatives in India” (July 2024). https://www.thelancet.com