Navratri 2023: While Maa Brahmacharini Embodies Knowledge, Girls Still Struggle To Get Educated

It is the second day of Chaitra Navratri, and it is dedicated to Maa Brahmacharini, who wears white clothes and holds a japamala. She symbolises knowledge. Brahma means sacred knowledge and universal self, while Charini refers to a female version of behaviour, conduct, and proceedings.

According to Vedic texts, a Brahmacharini is one who pursues sacred knowledge. Devotees offer prayers to her to impress her and be blessed with knowledge. While people chant her name, they forget that even in 2023, girl students in India struggle to get educated.

Struggle Of Indian Girls To Get Enrolled In Primary School

Education is one of the primary criteria where a country’s progress is judged. While it has improved over time since the partition in 1947, the reality remains that many girls in India are still deprived of education as opposed to boys.

A report shared by the Press Information Bureau and the Ministry of Education, enrolment of girls for primary education increased from 101.78% in 2018-19 to 103.69% in 2019-20. This was before the pandemic hit the world, and everything shut down.

During the third wave of Covid-19, a parliamentary committee confessed that girls were hit the hardest because of the lockdown, especially their education. It was noted that poor families struggling financially held girls back and encouraged boys to pursue education.

In cases where the condition was grimmer, families asked their kids to sit at home, irrespective of their genders. Another factor in this was the lack of access to gadgets. When many schools started online classes, kids who had smartphones in their homes were the ones who attended these classes.

In many instances where there were more kids than the number of smartphones at home, the preference to pursue education was given to boys. The education ministry even submitted a report to the parliament where it highlighted that the closure of schools affected about 320 million kids in India between pre-primary and tertiary levels. 158 million of those were female students.

The committee also noted that in the post-pandemic era, many female students permanently dropped out to help their families with the household chores or take care of younger siblings and kids at home.

Reasons Why Girls Are Still Struggling For Education

Apart from the pandemic, girls in India have to struggle with gender bias. As mentioned above, many families in the rural parts of the country prefer to send their sons to schools rather than their daughters. If the daughter can understand household chores and participates in them, she is asked to stay at home, help in the kitchen, wash clothes and take care of younger kids.

In a post-pandemic world, the digital medium of education has seen a boom, but girls or boys can only attend classes if their families have enough money to provide them with smartphones.

Another major reason behind girls struggling to get educated is period poverty and the stigma around menstruation. A report published by NGO Dasra in 2019 stated that about 23 million drop out of school every year due to a lack of menstrual hygiene. The number increased during the pandemic when the shutting of schools deprived young menstruators of access to free sanitary pads.

If a family cannot afford to buy a few pads per month, how can they send their daughter to school? Moreover, if these girls use makeshift pads, they cannot wash them and use another one while in school, where toilets have been reported to be in a poorer state.

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What Can Be Done?

Over the past few years, India has seen more girls enrolling for secondary and higher secondary education. Centre and state governments should issue measures along with already existing scholarship programmes to promote more girls and women to study further.

The idea behind education is to get employed and earn money to sustain a living. Therefore, the government also needs to focus on increasing employment opportunities for women. It will work like a reward system where girls from a young age and their families would see education as a means to improve their standard of living by getting employed in the future.

As far as period poverty is concerned, the dialogue needs to be continued along with spreading awareness. Many NGOs and menstrual hygiene companies have been distributing pads and sanitary products in rural areas, they have to ensure that the quality of these products is top-notch so that girls do not go back to using cloth pieces or makeshift pads.

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Many schemes also provide free textbooks and uniforms so that parents do not feel the burden of spending more than the school fees. Over time, it will help families see their daughters as assets rather than liabilities.

The Indian government is working towards bridging the gender gap in the field of education, however, we need to do more, especially to undo the damage caused during the pandemic.