Context

• Non-governmental organisation Child Rights and You (CRY) has launched Poori Padhai Desh Ki Bhalai, a nation-wide awareness campaign, with an aim to increase the faltering participation of the girl child in Indian schools.

About Poori Padhai Desh Ki Bhalai campaign

• The seven-week-long campaign commenced June 24 in five cities namely Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai and Kolkata, and aims to engage all its stakeholders to address gender disparities in education.
• As per CRY, field experiences suggest that socio-economic challenges, cultural norms, gender discrimination, early marriages, inadequate school facilities, long travel distances and safety concerns on the way to schools hinder girls’ educational journey and continue to pose significant barriers for girls in completing their higher secondary education.
• This increases the number of school dropouts and makes them more vulnerable to child labour, underage marriage, teenage pregnancy, abuse and exploitation, and even child trafficking.

Key Facts on Girls Education

• A little less than 60 per cent of girls are enrolled in higher secondary education, according to the Union Education Ministry’s UDISE+ (Unified District Information System for Education) datasets.
• In other words, only three of every five girls in India make it to  11th and 12th standard.
• One of every three girls (35 per cent) of the corresponding age group is out of school at the secondary level, while one of every eight girls (12.25 per cent) of the corresponding age group drops out and hence does not complete secondary education.

Need of the Hour

• Ensuring higher secondary education for girls is a non-negotiable for their empowerment and the nation’s development.
• Targeted interventions with specific goals and action points are needed to support girls beyond elementary education.
• This includes adequate public provisioning for girls’ education, financial incentives, improved infrastructure, community engagement, and robust enforcement of laws against child marriage.

Significance

• Providing higher secondary education for girls has a strong correlation with delayed marriage for girls, improved health outcomes for the mother and the child, and offers high economic returns in the long term.
• Furthermore, each additional year of schooling leads to higher productivity and better job opportunities in the formal sector for girls, thus breaking the cycle of inter-generational poverty.

Source: DTE

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