Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Friday received a shock as the Calcutta High Court issued a contempt notice against him and other officials over an incident in which a 10-year-old student of internationally famous Visva Bharati University-affiliated school was made to lick urine as punishment for bed-wetting.

Manmohan Singh is the chancellor of the university.

A division bench headed by the chief judge of the court heard a public interest litigation which pointed out Visva Bharati, founded by Asia's first Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, has violated the court's earlier directive by inflicting corporal punishment on the child and issued the contempt notice.

The incident occurred on July 7 at the university-affiliated school located at Bolpur in Birbhum district in eastern India's state of West Bengal 160 km from the state capital here.

The traumatized young girl since then has been refusing to attend school and there has been an outrage throughout India.

The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) has condemned the incident as "barbaric".