The French fashion designer, Coco Chanel rightly said, “A girl should be two things: who and what she wants.” There is no doubt that no avenue is beyond the ability of women and girls. We’ve come across women thriving in many fields, from the arts to politics. Since the dawn of humanity, women have had to play various roles, from food-grower to family-carer. Women are venerated and even celebrated, so much so that during the freedom struggle, the image of Bharat Mata by Abanindranath Tagore stirred intense passions and patriotism. However, I strongly feel that confident and strong women are not born that way, they are made and blossom through experience and the “most powerful weapon,” as Nelson Mandela called it, education.
Education isn’t just learning the laws of gravity or understanding the events following the French Revolution. It also means learning from all this, implementing them in our everyday lives, and inculcating the values we’ve learned by bringing them into the flow of ones’ thoughts. Furthermore, education isn’t just studying and learning values either, but extracting a learning outcome from any mundane event or task.
Returning to the words of wisdom by Coco Chanel, today, we can see how girls are not allowed to be who or what they want to be. Gender inequality and discrimination are not foreign concepts. In the light of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have witnessed yet again how girls and women are deeply affected whenever the world grapples with any kind of crisis. The high rate at which domestic violence has been rising to the threat of losing jobs for working women, simply because they need to spare time to take care of their children, are just a few examples.
Adding fuel to the fire, the new digital mode of education, it is observed, disregards the right to education of those belonging to certain economically weaker and disadvantaged sections of society, especially girl students. According to one recent study, conducted in the districts of Assam, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Telangana and Delhi, “only 47% families have the facility of phones, and this number falls to 31% when we count families having smartphones.” This was a study conducted by the Centre for Budget and Policy Studies (CBPS) in alliance with Malala Fund.
With the inability to afford and access gadgets like smartphones and laptops, or facilities like Wi-fi, the children belonging to these sections are being made to compromise on their education. The pandemic has only aggravated discrimination against the daughter and the girl child in a society that has always favoured boys.
Parents are favouring their male child while arranging for gadgets and devices to facilitate online education with their meagre resources. “A release from NEDAN foundation explained that in situations where only one person of the family has the mobile phone and internet access facility, both boys and girls are studying in the family, priority is given to study of the boy child over the girl child.”
Why is it that the girls’ education is not taken cognizance of? Where does the reverence for girls and women disappear to in such a situation? The answer is simple. Everyone has learnt to respect women only when they are motherly, caring, docile and subjugated. No one has accepted or celebrated women as humans, as equal members of the society, and most importantly, as equal to men.
Christine Lagarde had said, “We’ve heard a lot about the Internet of Things – I think we need an Internet of Women.” There is a dire need to learn the truth about girls’ education today. Girls are not able to attend classes and are not allowed to so that their brothers can. With the loss of education, the extent of freedom girls have is diminishing each day.
It is not just them who are forced to stay inside because of the pandemic, but their thoughts have been forced into quarantine as well. This is leading to many girls battling depression and anxiety, causing them to bend and break.
A Rapid Assessment study was conducted in the month of May in Bihar, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh by the Population Foundation of India (PFI) on the mental health of adolescents. “The survey collected responses from 801 respondents (271 boys and 530 girls) in the age group 15-24 years.” According to the study, “more than half the adolescents the study spoke to confirmed that they had access to information on mental health, and nearly half among them said that they had used some form of mental health service or resource.”
“Almost nine out of every ten young women (89%) in Uttar Pradesh sought help for mental health during the COVID-19 lockdown.
In Bihar, 28% of female adolescents surveyed said they felt depressed during the lockdown as compared to 17% of male respondents. Also, 2 out of every 10 adolescents surveyed in Rajasthan felt depressed due to the lockdown,” an NDTV report on the study mentioned.
The stigma associated with mental health and disorders has left young girls drowning in this sink-or-swim situation, and their feelings and desires have been shipwrecked.
From the economic perspective, the pandemic has left many unemployed with the devastating conditions the migrant labourers now have to live through. The financially weaker sections were the worst hit by the pandemic and the subsequent crisis of unemployment. As a result, child labour has been on the rise, with the children belonging to these sections being forced to take up menial jobs at construction sites, packaging, delivery of goods, and more, battling the deadly virus itself.
Something we must pay heed to now is, what the status of girls’ education will be after the pandemic. India could lose its progress made on girls’ education. While there are schools making concerted efforts to install sanitization facilities and maintain social distancing, once the ‘offline’ classes resume after the long break, the sanitation facilities exclusive to girls in terms of personal and menstrual hygiene don’t seem to have been taken into consideration.
According to a 2019 audit by the CAG, over 70% of schools it surveyed did not have running water facilities in the toilets, while 75% were not being maintained hygienically. The CAG audit conducted a physical survey of a sample of 2,695 toilets built by central public sector enterprises in 15 States. Almost 40% of toilets were non-existent, partially completed or unused. When the lack of proper washrooms has been a cause of the drop out rate in a pre-COVID world, is there hope for the ‘post-COVID’ to become any better?
A. Cripps said that “Educate a man, and you educate an individual. Educate a woman, and you educate a family.” Keeping this in mind, we, as vigilant members of society must strive to promote and educate our girls. We must work towards preserving and upholding the grandeur of the history that women have created and strive towards a more gender-inclusive education system.