FRIDAY, APRIL 26, 2024
Siddharth Desai
The Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (BBBP) is an initiative jointly run by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare and Ministry of Education launched in the year 2015. The objective behind ‘BBBP’ is to provide support and opportunities to the girls in India, it also aims towards promoting awareness about the rights of the girl child and to increase awareness on the importance of girl education and their health and nutrition. It is a large-scale awareness program that aims to reduce the preference for male children and empower girls through education. It is a tri-ministerial convergent effort with a focus on awareness and advocacy campaign for changing mindsets, multi-sectoral action in districts, enabling girl education and effective enforcement of Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PCPNDT) Act. The scheme conducts activities at the district level such as communication campaigns via radio in regional languages, SMS and social media messaging and regular monitoring of gender outcomes.
Government of India has time and again undertaken many initiatives and has reiterated its commitment towards gender equality and we see a lot of initiatives in the area of education, healthcare for women, nutrition, economic empowerment. ‘BBBP’ becomes a very crucial component of this entire arena of interventions because this really tackles the mindset and the behavioural change towards attaching more importance to the girl child and we all know that without changing the mindsets and the behavioural changes towards a girl child all the other interventions become meaningless. ‘BBBP’ has had positive outcomes in the country and this was very well acknowledged by everybody.
The two aspects that got remarkable success relating to ‘BBBP’ is the child sex ratio and education. One of the biggest concerns which has been disturbing in India has been the declining child sex ratio till few years back and the good part now is that there has been an improvement in the child sex ratio in at least 14 States & UTs recently. In education we have seen massive strides, the gender literacy gap has shrunk from 55 per cent to 70 per cent. We have achieved gender parity from elementary to higher education level. Sure, the school dropout among girls is much more but we are seeing a consistent reducing of the gender gap even in the out of school children.
It is a fundamental right for every girl child also to get education, now we are seeing that the mindset of most family members changing even in the rural areas. If we recall the selfie campaign which started in Haryana, when the sarpanch of a small village Sunil Jaglan from Bibipur in Jind district clicked a selfie with his daughter which started well-known selfie campaign with hashtag #Selfiewithdaughter#. The mindset is changing even in the rural areas and even in the small villages parents are now realizing the importance of education, sending the little girls to school and gradually to higher education, the importance of education is being recognised. This campaign of ‘BBBP’ has been very instrumental, it's a very catchy slogan Beti Bachao Beti Padhao that has definitely helped a lot in recognising the worth of the girl child vis a vis the male child.
The States are gradually coming up and we see a remarkable change in Madhya Pradesh and Haryana. Earlier this scheme was only confined to a few States but now it has become widespread, it is taken on a pan-India image and gradually whole country is now realising the importance of the ‘BBBP’ mission set up by the government. There are 3-4 things that we really need to focus on, first is strict implementation of the PCPNDT Act. There are some loopholes at which we need to plug in, tighten and have a better and smooth implementation. Secondly having relatable role models in the villages, it's not only just a Kalpana Chawla or a Sarojini Naidu, we need to have more relatable role models within the village that they can themselves associate. For example, a woman who becomes a carpenter in the village if she's given a skilled training and she becomes a carpenter or she's doing a non-traditional work she may become a role model in that village. We need to really appreciate the work that self-help groups, ASHA and Anganwadi workers are doing, as we can see that they have emerge as real heroes in the pandemic.
Ministry of women and child has constituted a gender-based budget committee which includes representatives from all ministries with NITI Aayog as a member of that committee. It was indicated that we need to have sex disaggregated data and have a monitoring unit. We can have a gender-based budget, but without proper data and without proper monitoring to see the baseline, midline and how it is eventually impacting gender related outcomes our entire exercise may become meaningless.
So, we need to have monitoring indicators at place and having programmatic sex disaggregated indicators within the budget that would really help in enabling better outcomes towards gender. At the end I remember a quote by Brigham Young “You educate a man; you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation”.
(The author is an advocate by profession)
