Prestige University

It is said when you educate a girl child, you educate an entire family. Since times immemorial, women in India have been regarded with the utmost respect and accorded prestige. For a nation to progress, it is essential to empower girls. And there can be no better tool than education to empower girls to enable them make better life decisions and improve their health, with positive consequences for their families and society as a whole.

Any society’s true growth and improvement are unattainable if females are excluded. Future social and economic goals are highly reliant on the current state of females. Individuals, families, and society as a whole gain from female education, which produces some of the best returns of any investment. Females have the power to influence their families and communities in ways that have never been seen before.

In India and the whole world, everybody talks about girls’ empowerment. However, the fact of the matter, complete Empowerment of women in India is still a far cry as they are way behind males in terms of literacy rate. Despite various government’s initiatives and schemes launched to increase female literacy rate in India, the female literacy rate in India is merely 65.46% compared to 82.14% for males.

Why girls lag behind in literacy?

One of the primary reasons for low literacy level among girls is disinterest of parents as they think that it is more important for the boys to study and get education. In addition, parents of girls’ children don’t want to invest their savings in their education as they think that girls have to go one day after marriage and do household chores only. Due to existing cultural norms, economically overburdened families wish to free themselves from the liability of raising a girl child.According to available data, in India around 165 million women over the age of 15 are illiterate and just 49% of females participate in secondary school. Due to widespread societal and cultural prejudice against women, females in India are frequently denied an education. Investing in female education, on the other hand, has significant societal benefits, such as fewer families and a lower risk of domestic violence, improved vaccination, and lower newborn mortality rates, and a bigger, higher-quality workforce.

To comprehend the current predicament of girls and girls’ education in India, particularly in rural areas, it is necessary to recognize that prejudice has deep cultural and societal origins. Girls are routinely denied access to education, and cultural norms surrounding puberty frequently prevent them from leaving their homes and communities to attend schools or colleges.

Women have been primary targets of this denial of basic rights in the majority of societies for a large part of the history of mankind. Whether it is the right to life and liberty or freedom of opinion and expression or the right to work and education, women have been on the `receiving’ end of this spectrum. Still, there are large segments of societies, cultures, or people who choose to hold on to this outdated outlook against female education or empowerment.

Gender equality still a distant dream

According to the U.N., 131 countries have enacted over 274 regulatory reforms in support of gender equality. India has seen an increase in women’s participation in the urban sectors but the circumstances still seem dire.An increase in participation doesn’t necessarily signify equal representation. Women constitute almost 40% of agricultural labour but are controlling less than 10 % of the land. They are excluded from the formal economic sector, which highlights the exploitative nature of the society we live in, which is based on gender partiality. In developing countries, 35% to 85% of girls are forced to stay home from school to take care of their younger siblings or the house, which makes the female student attrition rate dramatically higher than their male counterparts. In most cases, this automatically creates a hierarchy and reverence of the money maker leading to domestic abuse primarily against women, which is the main cause of frustrations and traumas.

Financial Independence and abilities developed through a formal education system enable women to break this social cycle to be able to stand along with the opinionated moneymaker and provides them with the strength to step out and learn the ways of this world, instead of confinement to the domestic chores.

Girls’ education plays a vital role in the overall development of the country. It is reasonable to look at this education as the development of half of the human resources of a society or a nation. This analogy helps to understand the importance of female education and empowerment towards improving the quality of life at home, outside, or even in a nation.

Even as India gained Independence in 1947, it took several governments over six decades to make education a fundamental right. In April 2010, India became one of the 135 countries to make education the fundamental right of every child. After the 86 Constitutional Amendment, every child aged 6 to 14 years had the lawful right to pursue education, irrespective of their financial background, Caste, colour and gender. Several schemes like Beti Bachao Beti Padhao were implemented to ensure that girls, as always, are not the most disadvantaged group when it comes to education.

In order to encourage girl child and parents towards pursuing education, both the Central and state governments started providing mid-day meals and bicycles and scooters to girl students to encourage them to come to school every day. Because of slew of measures and initiatives taken by the government, the percentage of girl students pursuing education has significantly increased and accordingly the percentage of total girl child population aged between 11 to 14 years, not attending school has significantly dropped from 10% in 2006 to 4.1 per cent in 2018.The share of overall course enrolments from women increased from 26 per cent in 2019 to 36 per cent in 2021 and the gender gap narrowed from 23 per cent enrolments from women in 2019 to 32 per cent in 2021.

“Gross enrolment ratio of girls across all levels of education is now higher than boys. At the elementary level it is 94.32 per cent as against 89.28 per cent for boys, at the secondary level it is 81.32 per cent as compared to 78 per cent and at the higher secondary level girls have achieved a level of 59.7 per cent compared to only 57.54 per cent.”

According to Bloomberg, higher female literacy rates can “yield a growth premium in GDP.” Despite laudable progress made in ensuring education to girls in India, much needs to be done for societal awareness about the importance of educating girls and helping them to catch up with our boys in terms of acquiring literacy. A complete empowerment of India is possible only when our girls are educated on equal footing with boys.

(A marketing initiative by Open Avenues)

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