Faith

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Report on status of Girl Child Education in Jharkhand


Sanjay Pandey

The progress of any region depends upon proper utilization of available natural and mineral resources and in turn it depends on the quality of human resource. Education is the prime indicator of human resource development. The basic education starts from the age of five onwards. It is an established fact that basic education improves the level of human well – being especially with regard to life expectancy, infant mortality, nutritional status of children, etc. However, in India out of 20 cr. children of 6-14 age group, 6 cr. are out of school. Thus there is a big gap in accessibility to primary education. A handful of people belonging to affluent section are availing their children costlier education is private schools while the children of vast majority of population deprived of having primary education.
The other side of this problem is prevalence of gender disparity and social gap. About 58.3% out of school children are girls Among Sc, ST communities 2901937 children are out of school (Source: AWP & B 2005-06). Even today the very narrow mindset of people is not allowing girl child to attend the formal school system. In this way girl child education has a poor condition in our nation. Since independence focus has been given on promoting primary education. By the 86th constitutional amendment, elementary education for every child between the ages of 6-14 years has made fundamental right.
On the basis of report of Kothari committee (formed in 1964), the first National Policy on Education was declared in 1986. Since then many efforts has been continuously put to universalize the elementary education like ---- Operation blackboard Non formal education to achieve the universalisation of elementary education by the end of 2000, Mid day meal in 1995 as the national programme of nutritional support to primary education, District Primary Education Plan ( DPEP) – to develop and implement in selected districts a sustainable and cost effective programme to reduce differences in enrollment , drop out and to reduce overall drop out rates for all students to less than 10% and to provide all children an access to primary school. By the 73rd amendment, to reduce the gap between the community and education, the education is transferred to Panchayats as per the XIth schedule., Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan ( SSA) – It is time bound, integrated approach to universalize education and aims to provide useful and quality elementary education for all children in the 6-14 age group by 2010. SSA recognizes to make the education system responsive towards the needs of girls to increase retention of girls in schools and generate demand from community for girl’s education.
The status of education has a very dismal picture in Jharkhand. It has not been deprived of schemes being formulated under national policy but yet could not able to transform the educational scenario. There may be many reasons for that. One can clearly see the prevailing regional, social and gender gap in the state in terms of accessibility to education. Literacy rate is the important indicator which narrates where does our state stand in human development index.
In Jharkhand literacy rate is only 54.13%{67.94 %(male)&39.38%(female) } that is below the national average of 65.38%{ 75.96% (male) & 54.28 % (female) }. This is in totality but while looking at the literacy scene by bifurcating into region and gender wise it comes up with grim picture as depicted in graph below.
It says that a big portion of the population of Jharkhand can not even read and write and there too female’s position is very poor in rural area compared to urban. After formation of new state, Jharkhand Education Project Council (JEPC) has been implementing four projects for spread of elementary education namely – DPEP, SSA, NPEGEL, KGBV. Hence works have been accomplished in the state towards achieving the goal of UEE but due to slow pace the target of hundred percent enrollments and retention of children in schools is yet not attained.

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