| Sreelatha Menon: Hunger for education |
| EAR TO TH EGROUND |
| Sreelatha Menon / New Delhi March 16, 2008 |
| As a recent successful scheme in Kerala shows, the removal of hunger of the entire family is the first step towards having a full classroom. |
| Why do girls drop out? In fact, boys drop out too, for hunger is a great equaliser and gender differences can vanish in an empty belly. If the dropout rate for girls till Class V is 25 per cent, it is 30 per cent for boys. In high schools, the rate is 63 per cent for girls and 60 per cent for boys. |
| Mahua Sundari, a middle-aged Muslim woman in Chapra in West Bengal, has six children, two of her three sons dropped out while one never went to school. Of the three daughters, Sagori, Sukila and Dukhila, the first two have migrated to Delhi to work as domestic helps after studying up to Class IV and Class V, respectively. |
| Dukhila continues to stay with her mother and go to school. Why did Sagori quit school when she was in Class IV? She says education did not cost anything till then. But after Class V, one has to buy books and pay fees, which they could not afford as their father was ill. Sagori thinks she is lucky that she is working. Her classmates got married when they were 13. It is cheaper to get married early, she says. The dowry demanded usually includes Rs 25,000, some gold ornaments, a cycle, or sometimes even a bike. That is what they demanded from Shukila. |
| The two sisters instead decided to work and earn despite the criticism from relatives and villagers. They are keen that Dukhila completes her education. |
| There is actually no substitute to food when one is hungry. And for a poor family like that of Mahua Sundari, education offered no solution to hunger. |
| The only benefit that Mahua has got from government schemes is that she assists in cooking meals in a school where her own children did not have the fortune to study. She earns a bit. The rest is provided by one of the three married sons and her working daughters. |
| The Sarva Siksha Abhiyan is meant to encourage children to continue education. It is building toilets, providing drinking water, teachers, even if ad hoc ones, and now more and more scholarships, especially for minorities. Mahua Sundari is, of course, clueless about all this. |
| The government is also building more special schools like the residential Kasturba Vidyalayas. |
| But will all this help? The poor and the needy need to be sought out. Every one needs to be identified and specific solutions found for their specific problems. In a billion-plus population, reaching out to each of them seems impossible. |
| Kerala has made a brave beginning in budgeting for the poorest families. The programme, called Ashraya, has so far identified around 50,000 families in 600-odd panchayats and set aside a budget of Rs 254 crore for them. Each family gets Rs 50,000 in the form of home for the homeless and land and employment through Kudumbashri self-help groups, which have swept the entire state. |
| The identification of the poorest of the poor is done using indicators like ownership of home and land and if the family is headed by a woman or has an illiterate adult member. |
| It is not clear if the family is counselled on the education of children and their future. But the process of identification and outreach is set in motion. The removal of hunger, of the entire family, is the first step towards having a full classroom. |
| Ashraya is a form of outreach which a caring society can have for its members. The rest of India can borrow a leaf and adopt the Ashraya approach to reach out to various sections homeless, dropouts, jobless, aged, disabled, and so on. |
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But the government of Indias bright idea of targeting dropouts is to offer Rs 500 monthly to a girl when she moves to Class X and beyond. So far so good. But as loan offers say: Conditions apply. The uniquely insensitive condition here is that the girl should be the only child of the parents. Mahua Sundaris daughters will never qualify.
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