Education is the right of every girl child and only education can make her realize her full potential as a self-sufficient individual and informed participant in change.
Question to reflect on
While girls from the privileged sections of the society have got the benefits of education, and opportunities to prove their worth, blazing a trail in every field, the fate of the ordinary girl child from a poor family has remained the same. Shackled to poverty, illiteracy and discrimination. Condemned, generation after generation to cooking, cleaning and toiling for low wages, being married off when barely 12 or becoming a victim of trafficking, bearing children, without respite or recognition. Will her fate ever change?
Background of the beginnings
Life in Addagutta, Secunderabad is a reflection of the larger poverty , backwardness and helplessness of the economically backward sections else where in India.
There are no pucca houses here, no proper drainage or water. Only four thousand people out of the 70,000 living here, have legal housing, the rest of them are squatters. The residents are essentially migrant labor from the neighboring states of Karnataka and Tamil nadu
Unemployment and crime run rampant. With jobless youth hanging around, either drunk or drugged, it is a fertile ground for politicians to pick up youth to create mischief and anti-social acts. The state of the older generation is no better. Most of them are either daily wagers, small time carpenters, plumbers, painters or cycle rickshaw pullers. With globalization and its accompanying ''find everything under one roof'' supermarkets, small time vendors and workers have lost out. Thus their income has also stopped or become erratic. That leaves only the women as the earning members of Addagutta. Most of them work as domestic workers. Amidst all this the girl child is all but ignored.
What is their future? Are they like their mothers and grandmothers going to end up as domestic help? Cleaning, washing and bearing children? Despite the world entering the new millennium is there going to be no change in their life? These questions plagued the local women’s group, Jyothi Mahila Mandali. They said enough was enough, and it was time to do something. So they approached Nirnaya, the locally based Indian women’s fund to help them. The JMM members had to do a small survey of the slum before they took any action. They did 500 door-to-door interviews to collect gender-disaggregated data on family size, income, type of work nutrition, education, health etc. At the end of the exercise these semi-literate members analyzed the data and pooled in their information. What came out of it was something the women knew but for us, was very revealing and disturbing. Only 34 percent of the girl child population in that particular pocket was going to school while all the boys were going either to the government or private school.
The option for schooling was either the government school, which is within two kilometers of the slum but across the road, or the few private schools in the locality. The government schools are badly furnished, over crowded, with a student- teacher ratio of 50:1 where the teachers don’t even know if a child is present or missing. Out of boredom the children just hang around lanes and by lanes.
The private schools, which are slightly better than the government schools, are very expensive for the community we are talking about. In keeping with the gender discrimination that faces even as we are approaching the MDG, only boys are sent to these schools. Girls do household chores or accompany their mothers to work and look after younger siblings. This state of things is more out of disinterest in the fate of the girl child that deprives her education, good food or clothing.
Jyothi Mahila Mandali started off the motivation on a war footing by visiting every house in the locality, knocking from door to door talking to mothers motivating them to send their girls to school. The JMM team showed mothers pictures of successful women, and asked the mothers:
Do you not want your daughters to become like that?
Do you want your girl to end up like you?
Do you not want her to become some thing great?
Do you know daughters are more caring than boys?
If your daughters are educated and earning they will take better care of you in your old age.
Do you want your daughter to be duped by someone because she cannot read or write?
Do you not find it difficult and shameful while boarding a bus because you cannot read?
Don’t you feel bad when you can’t read letters from your loved ones or write to them?
They told them stories of how women were relieved of their property and money by relatives and husbands because they were illiterate or uneducated. They could not open bank accounts because they were scared of going to the bank. Did they want their daughters also to end up like that?
All this persuasion and hard work paid off. Slowly the mothers started agreeing to send girls to schools. But they had their own doubts. Gowriamma said she could not afford to send her daughter to school because she did not have any money. Balamma was afraid of her daughters safety. She thought she was safer accompanying her to work than missing school and loafing around. They said if there was a free school which was close by, it would be good. The main motivation for the first 2 years were the fee waiver and mid day meal only.
