MUMBAI: Monika Mehtu’s petite frame gives away little about the feisty 13-year-old hiding inside. Earlier this year, the teenager from the Bhula village of east Singhbhum district in Jharkhand, and six of her friends, prevented the marriage of a classmate by intervening with the girl’s family and even threatening of police action when nothing seemed to work.
“At 13, a girl’s body is not ready to bear a child or take the responsibility of a household,” Mehtu, a seventh standard student, says with confidence. She recalled the day her classmate Sarita confided in her with tears that her schooling days were numbered. It was unacceptable to Mehtu.
An active member of the UNICEF’s ‘bal patrakar’ initiative in 60 blocks of east Singhbhum, Mehtu was well-aware now that child marriage was a crime that could attract the facilitators a punishment of two years. “I gathered my friends and directly marched into her house. We began with explaining the mother how early pregnancy could be potentially fatal to a young girl. Our final weapon was to tell them that we won’t hesitate to call the police,” she said. After three visits, she roped in her teacher Jagdish Prasad Mandal. Sarita’s parents finally gave in.
Damodarpur, a medium size village located in Boram district of east Singhbhum, with a total of 213 families, has not seen a single child marriage in the recent times. Mandal declares with pride, “More than 60% of my students at the Damodarpur Upgraded Middle School are girls and the drop-out rate is close to nil.” Village Pradhan Ashwini Singh said the credit for preventing early marriages and helping girls finish school goes to programmes such as bal patrakar that has been running hand-in-hand with the state’s broader initiative called ‘bal sansad’ or children’s parliament.
Pioneered in Jharkhand schools around 2012, the unique way to teach children about the democratic processes, has now been adopted across the country. The team of bal sansads is led by a ‘prime minister’, who heads the cabinet ministers, all elected by students. The programme, Mandal says, has groomed children to become expressive. “It has brought about leadership, communication skills and the sense to differentiate between right and wrong,” the teacher said. A key task of the sansads is to prevent drop-outs, high among adivasis and Dalits, and bring children back to classrooms by directly engaging with families. Jharkhand that has the third highest rate of child marriage in India, after Rajasthan and Bihar, is waging a complex social battle with children now at its forefront.
Less than 30 kilometres from Damodarpur and 12kms from Jamshedpur is a village called Punsa, where the students with the help of their teachers, prevented two child marriages in February this year. In the midst of writing her exam, Mali Singh (13), was summoned home by her mother. The 7th standard student, dashed from school only to find that the emergency was to serve tea to a group of visitors. Next, she was being paraded in front of potential suitors. One of the bal patrakars of Upgraded Middle School at Kolabani, Mali immediately brought it to the notice of her teacher Pradip Kumar, whose intervention halted things. He said, “The children have become our eyes and ears. They don’t hesitate to bring information about any child marriage being planned in their vicinity, or to confront families”.
Source: The Times of India