By Arun Anand, IANS
Jhansi : Rekha Sahu, a primary school teacher in Khajuraho Bujurg village in Jhansi district of Uttar Pradesh, was shocked when she found out that one of her Class 4 students had got married.
Sahu said she got worried when Kiran, a bright and chirpy girl, remained absent from school for a few days. So she asked Kiran’s classmates to enquire about her health. “I was shocked when I was told the next day that Kiran won’t be coming to school any more as she has got married,” she recalled.
But this wasn’t the first time such an incident had occurred. School-going minor girls in this rural region of Uttar Pradesh are often married off at a young age and forced to drop out of school, reports Grassroots Features.
“There is great awareness about the education of girls in this area but somehow it has remained confirmed to basic literacy level. The social taboos are still strong and hardly 10 percent girls make it to the high school, even lesser number to the college,” said Anil Kumar Srivastava, coordinator of the Babina Block Resource Centre that looks after basic education institutions in the area.
In Simarwara village, the government-run primary school has about 250 boys and only 70-80 girls. Ganpat Singh, a Class 8 student, said: “I have two sisters. Both of them were married off before they turned 15. One studied up to Class 5 and the other did not study at all.”
Ganpat admitted that his family never felt that there was a need to educate the girls further. He has two brothers, one of them works as a manual labourer in Jhansi and the other is unemployed. The boy wants to study further but is unsure about whether he would be able to continue his education.
One of the reasons cited by villagers for the high dropout rate is the lack of job opportunities for educated people in this area.
“We would like even girls to take up jobs after getting educated but the problem is that there are hardly any jobs here. That is why many children drop out. The girls get married while the boys start working at a relatively young age in factories or move to cities,” said Om Singh Rajput of Simarwara village.
However, that is not the only reason for a high dropout rate.
Alpana Singh, a primary school teacher at Khajuraho Bujurg village, said: “The region is facing a drought like situation for two years. So many families moved to cities seeking gainful employment. They generally move with their families. So a large number of children drop out of school.”
Another major problem is the poor state of infrastructure in the primary schools. A large number of schools in Babina block have no power connection and no functional toilets, let alone separate toilets for girls. There are only three computers for over 100 students.
The school in Khajuraho Bujurg, like other schools in the area, is allotted a meagre sum of about Rs.7,000 a year for maintenance. “That is not sufficient to pay the electricity bills. So there is no power connection in this school,” said Srivastva.
According to him, the village panchayats have refused to part with any money to facilitate a power connection on the plea that they are only allotted money for planned expenditure and there is no provision for electricity consumption.
Nor is there any provision for water supply. Singh said that most of the students bring water bottles from their homes as the only hand pump in the school has gone dry. “Many children go back in between classes to bring back some more water and quite often they do not come back as they are sent to fields or given some household work,” she added.
“This affects their studies,” she rued, adding that better infrastructure would obviously attract more children and help them to focus on studies.
Many villagers in Babina block complain that teachers often remain absent and the timetable is not followed. They allege that children feel neglected and the quality of education is poor.
That perhaps explains the mushrooming of several private schools in this area, which remain largely unregulated but continue to attract increasing number of children from relatively ‘affluent’ families.
Srivastava stressed that there is a need to create awareness among people to ensure that children and especially girls at least complete their school education. “We need to have some role models to do that,” he added.
He is probably right if the response to UNICEF’s Girl Star project is anything to go by.
From the second week of May, the lives and struggles of 15 women, who belonged to the marginalised sections of the society, were narrated through short films in the villages and small towns of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Bihar as part of the Girl Star project.
In Uttar Pradesh, this mobile theatre travelled to more than 60 villages in four districts – Bahraich, Varanasi, Jhansi and Lalitpur. Three films, of about seven minutes each, depicted the real life stories of Shabnam, Madhuri and Sandhya – all from Uttar Pradesh.
They are being projected as role models to inspire the rural folk, especially girl children and women. In Bijauli village, which is a couple of kilometres away from Khajuraho Bujurg, five-year-old Shobha, who studies in Class 5, saw the films and said: “I want to become like them. I want to be a doctor. I will study very hard and will not stop going to school come what may.”
Shobha was particularly impressed by the short film on Sandhya, one of the protagonists, who made it big in life. “I want to learn computers like Sandhya didi and I am sure I will be able to do that.”
Seven-year-old Sonu of the same village addressed the crowd of about 100, who had gathered to see the films, and said: “Like Madhuri didi, who ran a shop as a child to complete her studies, if my family is not ready to support my studies, I will work my way through school and become a pilot when I grow up.”
Dayanand Verma, a 39-year-old factory worker, said he wanted all four of his children to go to school. “I want them to study and achieve something in life,” he said.