Month: June 2020

The risk of girls dropping out of school in large numbers is real. The time to act, plan and stop a predictable slide is now.

In India, 320 million children have been affected by school closures caused by the coronavirus disease (Covid-19). Online classes do not factor in the country’s digital divide where 16% females have Internet access, compared to 36% males, according to the National Sample Survey 2017-18(HT Photo)

Her family has always “believed in education,” Vidhi Kumari, 18, tells me on the phone from her home in Mangolpuri, Delhi. So even though her mother never went to school and her father, a driver, studied only up to the 10th grade, four of her five sisters are graduates, one is in the 12th grade and the youngest, a brother, is in the eighth.

Even in these extraordinary times, Vidhi tries to keep up with her online BA classes. It’s not easy. “My sister and I share a phone so when she attends her class, I miss mine, and sometimes it’s the other way around.”

With only half attendance, Vidhi is one of the lucky ones. Many girls in her neighbourhood have dropped out — someone doesn’t have a phone, another has no money for recharge and someone else had to take up paid work. “This is a slum area,” says Vidhi. “There’s a lot of financial hardship here.”

In India, 320 million children have been affected by school closures caused by the coronavirus disease (Covid-19). Online classes do not factor in the country’s digital divide where 16% females have Internet access, compared to 36% males, according to the National Sample Survey 2017-18. This gap can sometimes have tragic consequences as in Kerala where a 14-year-old girl, a merit scholar, committed suicide when she couldn’t access her online classes.

Previous epidemics have taught us that it is the most vulnerable who end up bearing the heaviest burden. The 2014 Ebola crisis saw the number of out-of-school girls increase three-fold, says Safeena Husain, founder of NGO, Educate Girls, which works in 17,000 villages in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.

“We found that the two key indicators for girls being out of school are poverty and patriarchy,” says Husain. “When the two combine, there is an exponential increase in out-of-school girls.”

The education of girls has been India’s success story, so far. Although four million are still out of school, enrolment rates across all levels went up by 25 percentage points in five years since 2013.

The virus could reverse that success. “The lockdown is burdening girls with household chores and sibling care,” says Plan India’s executive director Mohammad Asif. If these girls drop out of school, we will see a spike in early marriage, child labour and trafficking, he warns.

Containing the pandemic has taken priority. Even Educate Girls is currently focused on distributing rations. “Nobody is talking about education right now,” says Husain.

We are sitting at the edge of a looming disaster. The time to act, plan and stop a predictable slide is now.

Now is when policymakers and non-governmental organisations need to talk to the girls and map a blueprint to keep them in school. Now is the time to identify vulnerable districts, plan hostels for marginalised girls, increase scholarships, and add breakfast to mid-day meals.

Now is the time to find out what it takes to keep our girls in school.

Namita Bhandare writes on gender

The views expressed are personal

The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted an old problem of the mistreatment of women in the labour room

The mistreatment of women in the labour room is fairly common, especially if you’re poor(Diwakar Prasad/ Hindustan Times)

Don’t touch me, the nurse yelled at the woman who was about to deliver her second child. On March 26, when the woman went into labour, fears of the coronavirus were high at the community health centre in Atraulia, Azamgarh. The Dalit wife of a daily wage labourer was made to wait outside until it was time to give birth. “Even then, the nurse refused to touch her, leaving the delivery to the dai (midwife),” says Sunita Singh, a social worker with Sahayog, an NGO that works on women’s health rights.

The mistreatment of women in the labour room is “fairly common, especially if you’re poor,” says Singh. The violence from midwives, cleaning staff, nurses and even doctors ranges from abusive language and sexualised comments to slapping and forcing women into birthing positions.

“There’s a clear power asymmetry that involves money, caste and class,” says Jashodhara Dasgupta, senior advisor, Sahayog.

The pandemic has underlined an old truth about labour room violence. On June 6, Neelam Kumari Gautam died during labour after being turned away from eight hospitals. At the first hospital, the doctor reportedly told her: “I’ll slap you if you take off your mask.”

In Hyderabad, a 22-year-old developed post-partum lung infection and died when no hospital would admit her. And in Uttarakhand, a pregnant woman delivered twins at home after being refused admission by five hospitals. She and her babies died a few days later.

A 2020 report, Human Rights in Childbirth, finds that pregnant women, especially those from marginalised communities, bear the additional load caused by strains on health systems. The World Health Organization warned recently that women are at “heightened risk” of dying at childbirth.

To meet the Millennium Development Goals on maternal mortality ratios (MMR), government schemes since 2005 have, through cash transfers, pushed for institutional birth, bringing MMR down from 370 per 100,000 births in 2,000 to 145 in 2017. The number remains unacceptably high, but “is a big achievement,” says Aparajita Gogoi, executive director, Centre for Catalysing Change, an NGO that works with women and girls. “Now we need to focus on quality.”

A 2015 study of 275 mothers in three Uttar Pradesh districts found that all had experienced at least one indicator of mistreatment — from being denied a birth companion to being yelled at.

Launched in 2017, the national Laqshya programme’s goal is respectful maternity care. It lists dos and don’ts for care-providers: No verbal or physical abuse, not leaving women unattended, providing privacy and taking consent before examinations and procedures. Reducing MMR is an incomplete goal unless there is an improvement in women’s experience of childbirth; an experience that does not put the priorities of health providers over birthing women, reducing them to passive participants.

If women are to put their faith in health centres, they must be assured of respectful and dignified treatment.

Namita Bhandare writes on gender

The views expressed are personal