Women and their education matter!
You will not acknowledge until you witness from your own eyes, the load of domestic chores a Rajasthani girl has to bear on her shoulders before getting ready to go to school as for girls, completion of domestic responsibilities is always prioritized over education.
Bhagwati Lassi Ram cooks bread, feeds chickens, washes dishes and even grazes her goats. Only after that she is enabled to dress up in her uniform and get ready to go to school that is 4 kilometers away.
According to Bhagwati, distance is a major factor why girls don’t take admission in school as they have to cross the highway, which is also a passage for drunk drivers.
There is an organization named as “Educate Girls” going door to door in search of girls who are kept deprived of academic education. Their volunteers try to convince their guardians about the importance of education. They also work in collaboration with schools to ensure the availability of bathrooms and also teach English, Math and Hindi. To this date, they have successfully admitted 1.5 lac girls in schools.
According to a survey, 30 lac girls aged between 10 to 14 years don’t go to school at all.
Child marriage is another hindrance in the way of girls’ education in India. In Rajasthan, 50-60% girls are under 18 out of which, 15% are those who got into marriage before reaching the age of 10 years. A report of UNICEF states that the ratio of child marriages taking place in India is way more than any other country.
A member of Educate girls Neelam Vishnu has first-hand experience in this regard. She got married at the age of 14 but she took a promise from her in laws that they will let her continue her studies. But when after marriage the promise was broken, she decided to take divorce. ‘It wasn’t an easy decision’ she says. ‘Everyone in village bullied me, disrespected me, my in laws assassinated my character and called me shameless’.
As UNESCO reports, every extra educational year of a mother decreases the death ratio of new born babies from 5 to 10% and it also increases her lifetime income or savings up to 20%.
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