National Girl Child Day is celebrated in India on every 24th of January. The objective of this day is the empowerment of girls, who until now have a very low status in the Indian societal setup.
The main reasons for celebrating this day is as follows:
• To curb the inequality faced by girls in India, and fight for equal rights for them.
• One of its primary motives is to win respect and importance for girls in Indian society.
• It also signifies the need for basic Human Rights to be given to girls, of which they have been devoid since long.
• To create awareness about the importance of Sex Ratio in our country.
• To create awareness about girls’ education and their social role to take the country ahead.
The Afghan writer, Khaled Hosseini says that “A society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated.”
Still, the education of girls and women in our country is taken for granted. People here believe that girls are better suited for domestic roles and the outer world is not for them.
The scenario tells us that the 21st century India is even more regressive than the 19th Century England.
On this day, when the whole nation is celebrating Girl Child, PM Modi’s Beti Bachao Beti Padhao Yojana, and one of the strongest Indian woman -Indira Gandhi, it forgets to look at some trends.
As highlighted by LiveHindustan.com,
The girl child marriage in the main Indian states have the following percentile:
West Bengal: 25.6%
Bihar: 19.7%
Jharkhand: 17.8%
Rajasthan: 16.2%
Andhra Pradesh: 161.6%
Uttar Pradesh: 6.4%
Haryana: 6.5%
Also,
• There are only 898 women for every 1000 men in India.
• Between 2010 and 2015, 919 girls were born per 1000 boys.
• Every year, 2, 39, 000 girls (younger than 5 years of age) are killed in India.
I don’t know how we can celebrate such a day after looking at these horrible trends.
Despite the governmental policies like Rajiv Gandhi Yojana and Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya Yojana, girls today find it difficult to even step out of their homes (and I’m not talking only about rural areas).
The solution, and the celebration, according to me, will start when our mindset will start changing. We, as the part of society, have to come up together to empower our girls and women. They need to be told about the opportunities that lie in front of them.
In a country like India, a girl child still has a long way to go.
