Padma Prakash: Educating girls

MOOT POINT

"Educate a girl, educate the nation". "Educate a girl and attain happiness." Slogans such as these appear on every public vehicle in Maharashtra. There is no gainsaying the message. Undoubtedly, educating a girl will contribute to the national good, insofar as a girl lays claim to being part of a nation. But why has a state that introduced free education for girls over 20 years ago moved to this new phase of rather inane sloganeering?

These years of free education for girls should by now have yielded to a more refined campaign directed either at those specially stubborn pockets of resistance to women's education or to encouraging girls' further education even without state subsidy.

The policy to introduce state subsidy for girls was based on several studies on why girls are not sent to school. The commonest reason for this is that in economically strained circumstances the education of boys takes precedence over that of girls.

In sum, if girls' education was free, there would be more takers. However, as an SIDA report on girls' education points out, there are several issues associated with the cost of education that need to be addressed: the cost of schooling including fees, books and transport, and the mother's income loss if the daughter is not available for domestic chores in the mother's absence.

But there are other associated factors that have received only patchy attention: availability of adequate women teachers; safety issues; and, of course, appropriate syllabi.

While girls' education in Maharashtra, for instance, has made progress, it is nothing to write home about. Sadly though, there are hardly any reliable, well-designed studies that have tracked the outcome of this policy of free education. Just how much of the improvement in girls' school enrolment has been because of the fee subsidy?

Which sections have been able to benefit from this? For example, in Mumbai, the relatively wealthy suburb of Bandra boasts of any number of good state-aided schools that provide free education for girls, but 10 km up north, where the real estate prices begin to drop, there are only newer private schools that are not state-aided and so need not (or cannot) offer such subsidised education for girls.

What are the other effects of the subsidy? There is anecdotal evidence that boys' education is being delayed deliberately. A vegetable trader/transporter/vendor may choose to let his daughter be in school up to the 12th standard, and have his son work in the business until after the girl is free to help out, allowing perhaps the mother to be employed.

There may be any number of changes that have occurred that we need to know to reckon if the policy has indeed yielded the expected results. Does education create expectations that the economy cannot fulfil? Does it create new domestic/familial demands on women? Clearly, it is not enough to simply look at numbers.

There are larger issues, too: How the career/employment or social trajectory of girls, now educated, is different from that of their mothers? Slogans of the recent past such as "educate a girl and you educate a family" or the more blatant "educated girls make better mothers" show a preoccupation with wife-mother-family roles of girls.

Education as a standalone asset is not being promoted. And that perhaps is the difference in secondary education attainments between the subcontinent and, say, the East Asian countries. Undoubtedly, education has meant a change. What is the nature of this change?

What should now be done to fine tune the policy to ensure that girls will be educated even after the 12th standard, when they have to pay for schooling? How can the social dynamics further influence so that even those pockets where subsidisation has not had a positive impact may be persuaded to allow daughters to go to school?

These now are the important issues in some states such as Maharashtra. In other states""most have introduced free school education for girls""the policy issues may be very different.

Against this background, the central government's grandiose decision to make girls' education free for girls from single-child families needs to be put under a scanner, not so much for what it proposes as for its avowed purpose.

The decision is meant to discourage families from devaluing girls and will stall the deteriorating trend in sex ratios in some pockets (one of which incidentally is in Maharashtra). At best the policy is ill-conceived and at worst, it seems to be pushing families to limit family size to a single child. If free education, offered in so many states today, has not had that desired impact, why will this scheme be any different?

The offer of free education is an important policy initiative and has implications for the state exchequer and for the beneficiaries of the subsidy. But promoted as a measure to persuade people to value a girl child, it smacks of being only a populist initiative.