Is it a Good Time to Be a Girl in India?

October 11, 2012, 10:39 am

By SRUTHI GOTTIPATI

It's one of the best times to be a girl in India's history, according to a government release earlier this year. The number of girls in schools has increased. The maternal mortality ratio has dropped. The government has carved out more money for women's welfare measures in the budget. And for the first time, women outnumbered men in the number of literates added to the country in the last decade.   

And yet, as the first International Day of the Girl Child was celebrated on Thursday, news of a string of rapes in a northern state, and the response to it from both low-level governing bodies and high-level politicians, highlights India's scuffled steps toward girls' rights and gender equality.

On Thursday, while international rights groups advocated eliminating child marriage, which disproportionately affects girls, politicians continued to debate a village council member's solution to a spate of reported rapes in the state of Haryana: get girls married off by the age of 16 so that they have their husbands for their sexual needs and don't need to go elsewhere. A former chief minister of that state, Om Prakash Chautala, also endorsed that view even though the legal age for girls to marry is 18.

Although bizarre statements about rape are hardly unique to India, they offer a clue to the plight of the girl child in the state. Haryana, which wraps around India's capital of Delhi, has the lowest child sex ratio of any state in the country, with only 830 girls for every 1,000 boys in the 0-6 age group, according to the latest census.

Which raises the question: Is it really a good time to be a girl in India?

In terms of child s ex ratio, India has 914 girls for every 1,000 boys, a figure that has worsened in the last decade and is the worst in independent India's history.

Countrywide numbers for crimes against women have also markedly increased, according to data from the national crime records bureau. The number of reported rapes, for instance, has shot up 30 percent over seven years to 21,397 in 2009. Moreover, those figures could just be the tip of the iceberg. Smaller sample surveys indicate that crime records could just be a fraction of the actual number of crimes against women.

The report released by the government in March, however, paints a different picture, based on other indicators, like education. The number of girls in schools in the age group 5 to 14 years has increased 10 percent over five years, to 87.7 percent in 2010 school year. Those enrolled between 15 and 19 years of age grew to 54.6 percent, from 40.3 percent, over the same period.

Literacy among women shot up from 53 percent to 65 percent over the last decade. The 110 million newly literate women added during that time outnumbered the newly literate men.

The data also showed that the number of maternal deaths has dropped to 212 for every 100,000 live births in 2009 from 301 deaths in 2003.

Allocation of money for gender issues has shot up from 2.79 percent of the total budget in 2005 fiscal year to 6.22 percent in the last budget, the government said.

India Ink also found other indicators where India didn't fare as well.

Underweight prevalence among adolescent girls aged 15 to 19 is 47 percent in India, the world's highest, according to a United Nations agency report, “The State of the World's Children 2011.” It also noted that more than half of Indian girls aged 15 to 19 are anemic.

“This has serious implications, since many young women marry before age 20 and being anemic or underweight increases their risks during pregnancy,” said the r eport. “Such nutritional deprivations continue throughout the life cycle and are often passed on to the next generation.”

On Thursday, international advocacy groups focused on the issue of child marriage, which they said had serious health implications for girls. If a mother is under 18, her baby's chances of dying during the first year of life are 60 percent higher than those of a baby born to a mother older than 19, one group noted.

Human Rights Watch also said in a statement that child marriages violate other human rights, including “education, freedom from violence, reproductive rights, access to reproductive and sexual health care, employment, freedom of movement, and the right to consensual marriage.”

“Girls who marry young are more susceptible to early pregnancies and reproductive health complications associated with early pregnancy,” the watchdog agency noted.

There are other problems as well. India has the highest levels of domest ic violence among women married by 18, according to the United Nations Population Fund. Moreover, there is a clear disparity between girls and boys when it comes to marrying young.

“Recent data show that 30 percent of girls aged 15 to 19 are currently married or in union, compared to only 5 percent of boys of the same age,” the report said. “Also, 3 in 5 women aged 20 to 49 were married as adolescents, compared to 1 in 5 men. There are considerable disparities depending on where girls live. For instance, while the prevalence of child marriage among urban girls is around 29 percent, it is 56 percent for their rural counterparts.”

The report argued for increased investment in India's large adolescent population that would help the country reap the demographic dividend when those adolescents become part of the workforce.

For now, there are small, positive signs. The percentage of women getting married under the age of 18 was cut nearly in half to 6.5 p ercent between 2005 and 2009 according to the latest government figures available.