According to Rawla, this is the second time in the last three months — the earlier occasion being on June 1— that he has received a message to clear school dues, that too when he does not have any dues pending with La Martiniere. “I am very pained by the message I received today. It seems that the school has such a sense of power that they do not care about anything,” Rawla told The Indian Express.

He said that when he had received a similar message earlier in June, he had protested against this but the school does not have seem to have paid any heed to that instance. “In the last few months, I have received no response from the school but only these two messages to clear dues,” Rawla pointed out.

Meanwhile the authorities at La Martiniere for Boys were quick to their defence and said that it was a mistake on the part of the electronic system. “This is a data entry error in the system. The message was not meant for Mr Rawla. We have outsourced the whole process where the message is sent through an ECS to a parent from the school,” said Supriya Dhar, secretary to the La Martiniere Board of Governors.

According to the school authorities, Ajay Rawla’s name was put in front of another student’s and the message was, thus, sent to him by default. “In June we had raised the issue with the service provider but the mistake occurred again. We have personally taken note that this is not repeated,” said a school official.

This SMS row has surfaced at a time when the school is already under pressure owing to the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights’ (NCPCR) recommendations, which include removal of Principal Sunirmal Chakrabarti and Middle School Head L G Gunion for their alleged involvement in corporal punishment and in the harassment of Rouvanjit Rawla in February.