Wednesday, January 11, 2006

A Call for Life!


Ray of hope for Bhide Wada

Finally after hearing countless instantces of apathy towards places of historical importance by concerned Indian officials, I came across this article in the Indian Express where some of them have finally woken up to preserve one of India's first girl's school. But a small note - it comes Not before a lot of damage as seen in the picture.

Maharashtra is one of the many states seriously looking at the missing girl child in India. It is only right then that in such times that a monument such as a girl's school (Bhide Wada) be made a National Monument -which is now under way.

The current figures taken from the Indian Express for the ratio of girls to boys is 759 to a 1,000 in India. The worst offender is Delhi with 631/1000 followed by Punjab: 614/1000. Maharashtra is not far behind with an appalling 749 to a 1000.

The article further goes on to state that in a study conducted it is seen "that that in households where the mother was educated, it was significantly more likely that the birth of a girl would not be followed by the birth of another girl."

The researchers found that the numbers of girls and boys born to couples who already had a son were about equal. But the sex ratio for a second girl where the first baby was a girl was skewed, leading to suggestions that girl foetuses are being aborted."

They said births of up to 10 million girls in India may have been prevented by selective abortion in the past 20 years. Half a million babies are aborted every year because they are girls, even though termination on the grounds of gender has been banned since 1994.

Female infanticide cannot be solved overnight. It is just not about men but also women standing up for their rights and keeping these unborn children from being slaughtered. All this just to avoid social evils of dowry, stigma of unlucky girl children etc, which we ourselves create and adhere too.

Note : Though the Indian Express article says the first girl's school in India was established by Savitribai Jotirao Phule, wife of Social Reformer Mahatma Phule in Pune on 1st Jan, 1848. There are historical records to show that in a place called Tranquebar in present day Tamil Nadu, there was a person called Ziegenbalg Bartholomaeus who started the first school for children on October 1st, 1706.

Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg was born in 1683 in Pulsnitz in Germany and was sent as a missionary to the Tranquebar port, a small Danish colony on the east coast (Bay of Bengal) in Tamilnadu, by the King of Denmark and Norway in the year 1705. He set up schools where all children, irrespective of caste and religion, could sit together and learn from the local teacher. Which was a wonder remembering the caste and class divisions prevalent at that time. Bartholomaeus wrote a book on Tamil grammar as well as a dictionary of Tamil. He died on February 23, 1719.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I have read extensively about the heartless infanticide of girls in India but still...everytime I read a new article about it, it still pierces right through my heart. A sad, unbalanced and unnatural future awaits all the men and women who are responsible for this...directly or indirectly.
Kill the daughters and die in want of love and a wife...