In 2009, the government of India introduced the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, making it the fundamental right of each and every child to get educated. But in a country like India, so polarized on caste, class and gender lines, where even the dignity of life can turn into a daily struggle, what does education actually mean? In a small village in Haryana, it is turning into the most important tool against centuries of gender and caste divisions.
A few hours outside Delhi, in Gijarod village, we meet Tamanna, a spunky, vivacious and determined 11-year-old. Her life’s greatest desire is to be a teacher, just like her Meenu ma’am, the lady who introduced computers to her life.
It seems to be a fairly ordinary childhood dream, until you dig deeper into her life and realise the odds that have already been stacked against her. Tamanna is the eldest of 3 daughters, born to daily wage labourers from Gijarod in Haryana’s Jhajjhar district, an area notorious for its abysmally low sex ratio.
Tamanna’s own village has a child sex ratio of a measly 660. As per the 2011 census, for every 1000 boys, Gijarod had just 660 girls in the age group 0 to 6. This is critically lower than Haryana’s own state average of 834 girls per 1000 boys.
Tamanna and her friends are the lucky ones, the ones who survived. They are the girls whose parents thought it fit to send them to school. A generation ago, that would have been unthinkable. Tamanna is a Dalit and the first ever child, let alone a girl child, in her family to receive a formal education.
Armed with these statistics and a desire to tell Tamanna’s story, I travelled to Gijarod. There I met Meenu Gotwal. Shy, reticent, but always smiling, Meenu Ma’am, the first computer teacher in the village. Not just any teacher, but a local girl who had grown up in the same village and gone on to revolutionize the way the entire village thought about girls, caste and education.
Like Tamanna, Meenu too is a Dalit. But unlike most girls in the area, she was backed by a father who showed tremendous foresight and wisdom and fought against the entire village to educate his daughters.
“People used to call me crazy. They told me to not to waste my money educating girls. But I come from a family of labourers and I knew that I had nothing else to give my daughter but education”, he reminisces. Today those same villagers look at Ratiram as a kind of pioneer in the village.
When Meenu was a student, the village school only had classes until Class 5. Ratiram did not let that come in the way of his ambitious plans. Decades before the government launched its ambitious ‘Beti Bachao Beti Padhao’ campaign, he sent Meenu to another school outside the village. She eventually went to Jhajjhar to do her Masters. This was at a time when most of her classmates were made to drop out of school after Class 5, to only be married off in a year or two.
Today Meenu is back in Gijarodh in a new role, as the teacher and coordinator for Project Udaan, an initiative led by students of Shaheed Sukhdev College of Business Studies that sets up computer labs in the most backward parts of the country. In an area that is often in the news for irrational dictats governing women’s clothes or their use of mobile phones, Gijarodh now actually boasts of its own computer lab, with 10 sparkling new computers. It almost seems irrelevant at this point, but I must mention, that Meenu is partially blind. Not once in my interaction with her did her gender, caste, or disability come up. It had all faded away in the face of her achievement. The hope from her story reflects in the eyes of every girl in the village.
In these parts, change is slow, but it is certain. For the first time, young girls are being seen as equal stakeholders in society. They are being allowed to dream of roles beyond marriage and childbearing. Many of them might drop out mid way but hopefully, many more will not. And then, there’s another, unforeseen yet no less spectacular transition – changing caste equations.
The lure of a computer education is gradually reversing generations of caste segregation. Despite her initial scepticism, today Meenu finds that of her 26 students, 20 come all the way from the other side – the ‘upper caste side’ of the village. In a small dusty computer lab in Gijarodh village, 26 students – 20 Rajputs, 6 dalits, 8 of them girls younger than 10 years of age, are part of a great social experiment. They are India’s children, taking their first tentative steps into a digital future.
