Goa government earlier this month amended the State’s flagship scheme, Laadli Laxmi, to provide financial assistance to a young woman upon marriage.
The scheme in itself has undergone changes to and fro since inception in July 2012. At its launch, the government had publicised the scheme to be addressing the undesirable tendency of female foeticides and with an aim towards erasing the general perception that the birth of a girl in the family is the burden on her parents/guardian during her marriage. The government had extended the benefits to education and business purpose apart from marriage.
However, the recent amendment to restrict the benefit only for the purpose of marriage is nothing less than the government declaring a post dated cheque of rupees one lakh in dowry to the bride. The only condition is that she should seek the dowry within 6 months.
Women rights activists point out that after the Covid-19 pandemic, the taboo of having a girl child has emerged to the fore once again and the government’s move would jeopardise a girl’s ambitions of higher education and being self dependent through employment.
The Goa government would receive appreciation if it could have provided the reasoning for amending the scheme as the flagship scheme has completed a decade of providing financial assistance to young women.
However, over the years of the scheme’s implementation not just women’s rights activists and organisations but every lay man would have come across atleast one story of domestic violence of dowry harassment in the light of the Laadli Laxmi scheme. In most of the cases, the monetary benefit of the scheme has only gone to the husband and the real purpose of supporting the girl’s family is never addressed in its factual reality.
What begins as a nag to ensure that the complete amount of the scheme is given to the husband, it ultimately culminates in harassment and violence if the woman takes a stand for herself or her parents. In most of the cases, the woman is often forced to break ties with her parents or in the eventuality of a child being born, is forced to demand that the expenses throughout the pregnancy and post-partum are borne by her parents.
In a society where domestic violence and harassment is considered a part and parcel of women’s life for a sustainable marriage, only a fraction of such cases get reported and when reported, the police working on a precautious mode do not take the situation as a law and order issue but more than often counsel the woman on realigning life around the realities in her marriage.
Thus, the Directorate of Women and Child Development needs to rethink the purpose of the scheme as the girl child and women are at the receiving end, and always in silence.
The government would turn the tables around only if it had to amend the scheme and provide the benefits to the girls only for the purposes of securing higher education or as a seed capital for self-employment opportunities. Rather than being a public dowry, the scheme could become a source of public empowerment of women.
The scheme could be amended to provide benefits to gain higher education in the 12+3 or 12+4 or 10+3 emphasising that every girl is either a graduate from a particular stream of academics or has achieves skill based training.
Goa’s society would reap social and economic benefits too if the educated girls are given the option to use the funds not just for higher education alone but as a seed capital to venture into self employment, rather than depending on interest free loan schemes of the government or the financial institutions including banks.
It’s time for the Government to innovate for future and provide better opportunities with prudence in finance allocation, so that every Goan woman can say, “There is no limit to what we, as women, can accomplish”.
