Sumita Kale: Education and women

Discrimination against women takes many forms and the problems begin before birth. Female foeticide has caused an alarming decline in the sex ratio, especially in the northern states. Implementing the law seems to be a tough proposition for the government. So now we have the proposed "Palna" scheme to encourage people not to abort and to leave their daughters in government centres. Admittedly it is difficult to change attitudes in a society but the question remains whether there has ever been any significant effort on the State's part to bring this change about. When it comes to empowerment of women, we find that for decades now, opportunities have been lost. The fact that education makes a key difference is well known but has not been given enough importance in planning.

In the latest National Family Health Survey, 41 per cent of the female respondents had no education whatsoever while another 23 per cent studied for less than eight years. Health indicators are much better for women who have completed eight-nine years of schooling. The percentage of women aged 20-24 who were married by age 18 has come down over the years from 54.2 per cent in 1992-93 to 44.5 per cent in 2005-06. Yet 71.6 per cent of uneducated women were married by the age of 18, this percentage plummets to 35.8 per cent for those who have completed eight-nine years of schooling. 32.6 per cent of the uneducated women aged 15-19 were already mothers at the time of the survey. The implications for maternal and child health are quite obvious here. We have a law in place for the minimum age for marriage, but clearly it is education that scores over the law in ensuring a better life for girls.

Again, taking a look at the percentage of women who have two living children and do not want any more children, the preference for a male child is distressingly predictable, but again education makes a difference. There is however a small silver lining here that 48 per cent of uneducated women who have two daughters say that they do not want any more children.

The ASER-Pratham survey of rural schools looked into the relation between the mother and child's education. It reports that the chances that a child is out of school is much higher for an unschooled mother. Gender difference is acute when it comes to unschooled mothers, the percentage of boys out of school is 8.4 per cent while girls out of school is 11.4 per cent. For schooled mothers, the comparative figures of out of school children are 2.3 per cent for boys and 2.6 per cent for girls. Looking at reading skills for children aged six to eight, 25 per cent of those with unschooled mothers cannot recognise alphabets compared to 13 per cent for children with educated mothers.

There is of course a significant interactive effect between income levels, class and gender "" poor lower caste girls have lowest education and health indicators. One does not need econometric analysis or Amartya Sen to link gender and class to growth and development and the need for changes in school facilities and education content has been stressed often earlier. Yet we see the speed with which the OBC quota bill has been formulated and passed, with no exclusion of the creamy layer. Contrast this with the Women's Reservation Bill which is probably the longest pending bill in the Parliament and the government priorities sadly become blatantly clear.

The author works at Indicus Analytics and can be contacted at sumita@indicus.net