This group of five went to the petty cigarette shops in the village that sold guthka, smokes and other addictive substances and worked out the sales in a day and multiplied it with 365 days to arrive at a year’s sales figure. Rs 7,34,000 was the amount that emerged as the annual expenditure made by the villages on “useless spends”.

“We are going to talk to our elders about this at the next village meeting”. The girls inform us.

In an area where communities marry off girls at 12 and 13 years, where the female literacy rate is a dismal 29 per cent, change is slowly but irreversible coming.

Across the country out of every 10 girls that are enrolled in a school only 3 complete Std X. The unfortunate truth is that daughters are made to drop out more often than sons. That’s the reason female literacy rate in India is 54.16 per cent meaning almost one out of every two women do not know how to read or write.

The Sheopur example can be seen across other states in the country and it is thanks to a pro-girl child project called the ‘Nanhi Kali’ programme that this has been begun to change. The vision of this programme is to ensure girl children are not discriminated against their right to quality formal education.

This Programme, Naandi in partnership with the K C Mahindra Education Trust helps in creating special sops and opportunities for girl children to enroll and complete 10 years of formal schooling with the guarantee that all of them will have demonstrable grade specific competencies in math, science and language.

The programme emphasizes on supporting girl children with a range of social, academic and material support that enable and empower her to continue schooling by minimizing social or economic constraints.

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