Meet Anuradha Sharma from Lalitpur

 LALITPUR IS IN the Bundelkhand area of Uttar Pradesh. And I’m sure many of you have not even heard of it. The problem is that where India really matters and lives is either serialised in crime series on television or people just don’t know about it until something big happens. I happened to meet a lady called Anuradha Sharma who was born and raised in Lalitpur.

Some of the life lessons she imparted in our conversation are so germane to today’s India. For starters, she said, and it is evident, that if parents of a certain belief system (I won’t even say strata or income), believe that their daughters are not to get the education they deserve, it is primarily because they believe that daughters are either a burden or that money would be better utilised to sponsor the education of sons in that family.

It may seem a simplistic societal belief, but it has its deep roots in the way we think. And the purpose of this column is to emphasise how parental upbringing, and more importantly, the focus on education in today’s India, is critical. The fact that we see disparities is not because they exist in absolute terms, but they exist because we have allowed a system and we have allowed our society to behave in a pernicious manner qua girls.

And we continue to do this even in today’s India. She then mentioned how under Yogi Adityanath law and order in Uttar Pradesh has improved, which means girls of a young age can actually now step out. And to her mind, this is a problem that was rampant before.

Many years ago, I remember telling one of the most powerful and lovely media barons of India why she should accept the Woman Entrepreneur of the Year award. Ideally, she should accept the award because entrepreneurship is gender-agnostic. But the fact is that we still have fora where there will be no women speakers.

Look at some of the mega summits that are held, and again, there are no women speakers. But where women play a role, they play a role magnificently. Some of the finest podcasters in our country are women and they lead from the front. They have enormous rigour, tremendous commitment, and perhaps the greatest integrity. So, somewhere we need to tweak societal norms from a behavioural pattern, and that is the most important thing that India needs to contend with.

And Anuradha’s point was that it didn’t matter which religion you emerged from, which caste you belonged to, but it all centred around education, either its availability or its deprivation. And her point, which is evident both in data and in terms of research, is that in today’s India, women still get short shrift as far as educating them is concerned. And the choices are not made on talent, aptitude, or intelligence, but merely on gender.

Many years ago, I had written an article for a newspaper where I actually analysed the income of a homemaker, erroneously referred to as housewife, and I found that if you were to just tabulate and pay for all that the homemaker does, from raising a family to, you know, tuitions for their children to cooking at home and the whole caboodle, the average homemaker in India makes twice or should make twice the amount that her husband earns. So, even from an economic contribution point of view, the contribution of women is far greater than you and I can imagine. But again, that is not mentioned and neither is it amplified, for which, again, society should hold itself accountable and responsible.

If as a country we are to move forward, something needs to happen in terms of our education system and the concentration of that system, its focus and its abilities to raise the role of women qua education must be given primary importance.