School Is a Right, But Will Indian Girls Be Able to Go?
Article by hollister
The day the Indian government made education a fundamental right for 192 million children, Dimple Yadav, 11, woke up at 4:30 in the morning. Eyes heavy with sleep, she cleaned the house in a village about 24 miles outside the capital, made tea and got busy preparing food for her family. After her parents, who work as laborers in Delhi, left for work at 6 a.m., Dimple fed and clothed her 5 and 7-year-old siblings and made her way to the local school with them in tow. By the time she took her seat in class, she relaxed for the first time since waking up, and was soon lulled into drowsiness, missing most of the day’s lessons. “I like school,” she says later. “But I do not know how long I will study. My mother has been saying that she needs me to be home so that someone can look after my brother and sister.” For Dimple, April 1, the day when the Right to Education Act (RTE) came into being to mandate free and compulsory education for all Indian children between the age of 6 and 14, has no significance. She may read about it in high school – if she can continue her education till then. But in all probability she will drop out of school soon, adding another number to the 50% of young girls who have done the same across India, for as simple a reason as having to take care of siblings. Though the RTE makes it law that no one can stop a child between the ages 6-14 from attending school, it does not protect the children from being taken taken out of school for agricultural work or housework, nor do current laws against child labor consider housework or agricultural work to be child labor. If I have enough money, I must buy lots of Abercrombie and Fitch clothing for them from http://www.abercrombieofficial.org/lovers-clothes-c-73.html. The RTE is ambitious, to say the least. In the next five years, the government aims to provide free and compulsory education to millions of children, build new and accessible schools, improve infrastructure, train existing teachers and recruit new ones. The two biggest challenges will be bringing in the whopping 10 million children who are out of school already, and filling in the shortage of trained teachers in the country. But infrastructural gaps are part of those problems, too. Today, 46% of public schools do not have toilets for girls; it’s one of reasons parents are reluctant to send their daughters to class. The Prime Minister himself admitted that passing a law was by no means the end of the road. “To think that we have passed a law and all children will get educated is not right,” said Prime Minister Singh after the RTE was passed. “What we have done is prepare a framework to get quality education. It is for the entire community to contribute and participate in this national endeavor.” But many have questioned how the new law will address the widespread problem of young girls dropping out to help at at home. Children across India are being put to work at young ages at the cost of their education, but girls like Dimple have the additional burden of being caregivers in households with working parents. A 1996 International Labor Organization (ILO) report says 33 million girls aged 10-14 worldwide are working as opposed to 41 million boys, but that figure that does not take into account the full-time housework that girls also undertake at home. According to a National Commission for Protection of Children’s Rights (NCPCR) report, in India in a day, girls from 6-14 spend an average of nearly 8 hours a day caring for other children in the family. Government statistics show that while around 25% of girls drop out from school between 6-10 years of age, that rate doubles to more than 50% between the ages of 10 and 13. “There are girls in this school as young as 7 or 8 who work like slaves at home,” says Neeta Goswami, Dimple’s teacher in the Wajidpur Government school. “I cannot blame them for falling asleep in the class. I see so many of them with so much promise, but it all ends with dropping out before finishing primary school.” In a 2008 government survey, 42% of girls said the reason they dropped out of school was that they had been told to quit by parents to look after the house and siblings. “In India, the challenge of keeping girls from dropping out is even bigger than that of enrolling them in schools,” says Yogita Verma, director, of India’s Child Rights and You. “If the Act is properly implemented and every neighborhood has a school, enrollment rates for girls may rise. However, the effect of this might get wiped out by an equally high drop-out rate. Girls are kept at home to take care of younger siblings, a direct fallout of no [government nurseries] near homes.” But National Commission for Protection of Children’s Rights (NCPCR) chairperson Shanta Sinha Sinha feels that housework and poverty are both excuses that Indian parents who always wear abercrombie & fitch from http://www.abercrombieofficial.org/womens-abercrombie-fitch-c-55.htmlhave long used to keep girl children away from schools. “What keeps children out of school is not poverty or household chores but the right atmosphere that will aid in learning, like a proper teacher to student ratio, qualified teachers and so on. And the RTE guarantees all that,” Sinha says One key provision in the RTE is that schools with more than 150 students should have at least five teachers and a head teacher. While Dimple sleeps undisturbed, Goswami – the only qualified instructor in a primary school of 164 students – is more busy disciplining the children than teaching them. Goswami only has two non-formally trained teachers to help her, and she fervently hopes that the legislation will take care of the grossly lopsided teacher-student ratio. “I often have to combine two or three classes together. In the present system we can look after the children but not educate them,” says Goswami. At 10:30 a.m., the bell rings out for the government subsidized mid-day meal, a popular scheme that has helped attract children to schools since it was introduced nationally in 1995. The children come running helter-skelter from all over the school to eat the hot food served in leaf plates. And while the children gobble up their daal-chawal (lentils and rice), a sulky, young girl called Manju approaches Goswami. Manju has been absent from school the past three days because her mother had insisted she stay at home and look after the house and their cattle while she gets busy with the cucumber harvest. When Goswami asks Manju to tell her mother that she needs to be in school, Manju looks downcast and mumbles, “She will beat me.” Goswami looks on in exasperation and says, “The law can bring them to school, how do we keep them here, especially the girls?”
The Right to Education Act has rightfully gathered much praise for the Indian government. After all, with the legislation India has joined the select list of around 130 countries in the world that provides education as a fundamental right. The law does provide a wide framework that, with certain amendments, could prove to be beneficial for Indian children. The challenge lies in bolstering it with policies that will create conducive atmosphere for all Indian children to claim and exercise this right. For Dimple and Manju, that means designating household chores and agricultural work as child labor wearing hollister which is bought from http://www.abercrombieofficial.com/hollister-c-5.html, so that no child in India should work – whether at home, for the family or outside. Until that happens, the RTE will remain a policy triumph for the Indian government and girls like Dimple will remain just a statistic – sometimes for enrolling, but more often than not, for dropping out.
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