India is still far from achieving gender equality and its skewed sex ratio of 940 females per 1000 males bears witness to this fact. A girl child in India is often seen as a liability, a ‘burden’ to pass on. Given the prevailing influence of patriarchal values, right from their birth, a lot many girls bear the brunt of gender inequality, gender stereotypes and are treated inferiorly, as compared to boys.
No matter how talented and ambitious she is, the girl child often receives the shorter end of the stick. In fear of exploitation and abuse, many girls are not sent to school and kept at home only to be married off early. And even if she is not married off, the young girl is still denied a deserving education, quality healthcare, employment opportunities and equal rights that a boy easily gets. While some girls manage to ‘escape’ from the shackles and try to build a bright future, most resign to their ill fate.
How can we hope for India to progress when half of our society remains under the shadow of discrimination? To find answers, we must first understand the key difficulties that a girl child faces.
Survival as the first challenge
While there are laws that ban sex-determination of a foetus and selective abortion, this practice continues in the shadows. This not only negatively impacts the number of girls born, but also affect the health and safety of the mother. Consecutive pregnancies with the hope of a boy take a toll on the physical as well as mental health as it is the woman who gets blamed for the sex of the baby. Stricter implementation and monitoring of laws, and better awareness, is essential to help the girl child survive.
Hurdles in receiving quality education
Recent national data reveals that the dropout rate for girls at the elementary level are 4.10% which rises to 16.88% at the secondary level, with the figures being substantially higher for girls from vulnerable groups (19.05% for SC and 24.4% for ST groups) (U-DISE 2015-16). The retention rate of girls at the elementary level is 70.6% which drops to secondary level is 55.5% (U-DISE 2016-17). Due to existing attitudes regarding girls’ education, safety concerns, distance between home and school, lack of affordable sanitary napkins, absence of separate and functional toilets, and poor school infrastructure, several teenage girls tend to become irregular in attending schools or drop out before completing their schooling. Only one in every three girls in India completes school education age-appropriately (U-DISE 2016-17).
Child marriage
Out of the 12.15 million children married in India, 8.9 million are girls, and married girls are three times the boys. As per Census 2011, there are about 3 million children below age 14 that are married. Rural girls constitute 55% of married children. Child marriage robs girls of their childhood as they step into adult roles that they are unprepared for – be it managing households, bearing children, making decisions and so on. It not only hampers her schooling but also pushes young girls into early pregnancy which harms the health and nutrition of the teenage mother as well as her child.