Sowing the seeds of change

A small wooden board, about 1.2 metres long and 1 metre wide, enjoys the pride of place in the headmaster’s office of the government school in Doogeron Ka Tala, a small village in western Rajasthan, India. It lists the girls who have won laurels for the school in state and national sports championships. The headmaster can barely hide his excitement as he talks about the girls who have played kho-kho and softball at the national level. Incidentally, there are no boys in the list despite the school being co-educational.

In the feudal society of Rajasthan, boys go to school and girls do the household chores, taking the cattle for grazing and helping their mothers in the field. It is not surprising then that Rajasthan is at the bottom of the national chart, with only 52.66 per cent of women literate. But Doogeron Ka Tala sends all its daughters to school.

Rajasthan doesn’t fare well as far as the social indicators for girls and women are concerned. It has a dismal child sex ratio (for ages 0-6) in the 2011 census, with only nine districts reporting above 900 females against 1,000 males; in 2001 24 districts had surpassed this ratio. Ten years ago, the child sex ratio was 909 to 1,000, which has dropped to 883 to 1,000 now. In fact, the drop in the ratio between 2001 and 2011 censuses is more pronounced than in the national figures.

In such a gloomy scenario, Doogeron Ka Tala stands out like an oasis in the desert district of Barmer. Here, it is a crime not to send your daughters to school.

Winds of change swept this arid land in 1991 when four girls — Gumni, Nainu, Heera and Jiyo — stepped out of Doogeron Ka Tala to walk 6 kilometres to the nearest secondary school in Sanawra, on the National Highway 15. The government school in Doogeron Ka Tala is only up to class eight, and it was unheard of in western Rajasthan to send girls so far to study. But Gumni’s father Kistura Ram was resolute. “We always had women from other districts as teachers in our schools. I wanted girls in my village to study to become teachers themselves,” he says. “People said nasty things about me behind my back for sending my daughter and her cousins to school so far from here but nothing could budge me from my decision. In fact, it gave me the strength to convince elders in the village to make it compulsory for all girls to go to school.”

It was in 1991 that the panchayat got together and announced a fine on families that don’t educate their daughters. And it has been an unwritten law here since.

Kistura Ram was sarpanch of Hathitala gram panchayat — in which Doogeron Ka Tala falls — at that time. “We never decided how much the fine would be,” he recalls. “We thought it would be decided when such a case came up before the panchayat. But fortunately we didn’t need to. We managed to convince everyone to send their girls to school.”

Two years later, Gumni and Naino got into government service as auxiliary nursing midwives (ANMs) after they passed tenth standard. Villagers saw logic in Kistura Ram’s Pangloss obduracy to send the girls to a secondary school and the panchayat hasn’t had a single opportunity to impose a fine in more than two decades.

Thirty-six years old, Gumni is now posted at the Doogeron Ka Tala primary health care centre (PHC) and is a role model for other girls in the village. Kistura Ram’s other two daughters, Naino and Laxmi, also have government jobs, while the two sons are businessmen. Heera’s younger sister Dami played the kho-kho national championships for five years. Two girls from the village are constables with the Rajasthan Police and two have qualified to be physical education teachers.

Redoubtable Kistura Ram, who was sarpanch of Hathitala for a record 29 years from 1981 to 2010, practised what he preached. “And it’s a tradition that the village has continued to follow,” says Yogesh Beniwal, son of the present sarpanch Laali Devi.

In the past five academic sessions, enrolment of girls in the Doogeron Ka Tala government school has almost equalled that of boys. The academic year 2009-2010 was extraordinary with the girls outnumbering boys. There were 94 girls and only 85 boys. This year, there are 91 girls against 101 boys.

Headmaster Jetaram Chaudhary says this school has always been known for its girls. “There are five other middle-level schools under gram panchayat Hathitala but my school has the highest number of girls. Our girls have stood first in the state-level kho-kho championships for three consecutive years from 2001 to 2003. This year, one of our girl students represented Rajasthan in the national sub-junior softball championship held in Jalgaon, Maharashtra,” he says.

By contrast, when Jetaram was the headmaster of another middle-level school, from 1996 to 2003, in Booth Jaitmal village, girls never came to school. “It was a village dominated by the Rajput community, which is still rooted in the archaic social mores, and doesn’t believe in schooling its girls,” he says.

Kistura Ram says the change has been slow but constant. The mothers of Doogeron Ka Tala precipitated the change. They don’t want their daughters to face the ignominy of illiteracy and the trauma of early marriage. Take Pemi Devi, who is unlettered, and her husband, Hanuman Ram, who only studied up to class 5. But the couple have made sure their four daughters, Rajjo (14), Gawri (12), Jamuna (13) and Gaini (10), are regular at school. Jamuna is in class 8, Rajjo and Gawri in class 7 and the youngest one, Gaini, in class 6. “I will send them to secondary school after this. I want them to study to get into government jobs,” Pemi Devi says. Hanuman Ram is proud about her youngest daughter being more educated than him.

Like Pemi Devi’s daughters, four other sisters, who are in the Doogeron Ka Tala school, want to become nurses and teachers. Santosh (12), Ratni (10), Pramila (8) and Pushpa (7) are toppers in their classes. Their mother, Phoolwati, also went to the Sanawra school to finish her class 10 before she got married. “But she wants us to study further,” says Santosh, who is in class 8. Her youngest sister, Pushpa, a class 2 student, twitches her by the sleeve of her school uniform shirt to tell me that she wants to be a teacher.

Kamla Chaudhary is Pushpa’s inspiration. “People in this part of the state don’t send their daughters to school but at this school, girls come from 2-3 kilometres away even when they have primary schools closer to their house,” says Kamla, who has been in this school since 2009. “The quality of education is good here and parents prefer sending their girls here because of the large number of girls they have for company. They feel their daughters are safe here.”

But the apostle of this educational revolution, Kistura Ram has a grouse: “We educate our girls but our brides are illiterate.” The former sarpanch wants the daughters-in-law to study, too. “Why should marriage stop a girl’s education? My daughters-in-law wanted to go for higher studies and I was only too keen to let them follow their dream. One has recently finished bachelor’s in education while the other has completed the basic school teachers course,” he says.

The villagers in Sarnu, 58 kilometres from Barmer city, have followed in Kistura Ram’s footsteps. Realising that education is the way to empowerment and early marriage should not deny a girl her the right to education, elders have encouraged their daughters-in-law to pursue studies. It is common to find girls with vermilion on their foreheads in the senior secondary government school in Sarnu. Often their husbands are their classmates.

Of the 230 girls enrolled in this school in this academic session, several are married. Most of them are in classes 11 and 12, and they want to pursue higher education.

Mehro, Shanti and Umi, all in class 12, say they have taken a vow against child marriage and female infanticide. “We will never be partners in these crimes, no matter what,” Umi says. Social worker Mangilal Sharma adds, “Even the villagers now want to put an end to the age-old practice of child marriage.”

It wasn’t easy for most of these brides to persuade their in-laws to send them to school. “But, when these girls showed interest in studies, we encouraged them to go ahead. We spoke with their families and it worked. Today, some of them are doing very well in their classes,” says Dungara Ram, senior headmaster at the school.

Girls in this border district are charting a new path with education. An educated woman “pradhan” of Chohtan panchayat samiti (second level of panchayati raj institutions) is driving girls in 251 hamlets to schools. Twenty-eight-year-old Shama Khan is a law graduate, the only educated woman among the sarpanchs and panchayat samiti members in Chohtan, which shares 114 kilometres of its border with Pakistan. Here, animal husbandry is the primary source of livelihood and girls do the work around the house, walking several kilometres to fetch potable water.

“When I got elected to the panchayat samiti as a member, I would randomly walk into houses urging families to send their girls to school. In the past two years, school enrolment has leapt from 550 to 6,550. Most families had never sent their girls to school, but now when I take rounds of schools, I find more girls there. They want to be like me,” says Shama, who is also the only graduate among Chohtan’s women.

Illiteracy, female infanticide and child marriage have been the bane of girls and women in western Rajasthan. The female literacy rate in the state has seen the lowest decadal growth in the country, rising to only 52 per cent in 2011 from 43 per cent in 2001.

But remote villages in the Thar Desert’s golden sand such as Doogeron Ka Tala and Sarnu hold promise of a brighter future. Their girls who have become government teachers, nurses and constables only bolster this belief.

Rakesh Kumar is a writer based in Jaipur, India.