Satyamev Jayate....Jai ho!
Last year summer, Edulever conducted a feasibility study for a vocational training program in the mofussil town of Saharanpur in western U.P. As a part of this, we conducted a survey covering 1000 households situated in lower-middle income areas of the town. The target was to interact with youth in the 15 - 25 age group, but we decided to extend our mandate and look at the education status among 6 - 14 year olds as well. It was in this second category of children that we found something seriously amiss. The slide from the final presentation on the survey in which we highlighted the gender skew Of the 550 children for whom information was collected, the ratio of boys to girls was 65-to-35. Even in the older age group, there were only 78 females for every 100 males (for a pool of 1687 respondents). These were randomly selected households, though a majority happened to be orthodox Hindu families. We could not probe further into the reason for the gender skew - it is likely that in...