The Hindu Business Line : Family burden, no more!

With a Guidance Foundation course in place, young Muslim girls from villages in West Bengal, who have till now supported their families, seek professional education.

This year, in West Bengal's Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) for engineering and medical students, Shabnam Bano, the daughter of a tea-stall owner in Shamsi village, Malda district, qualified for admission to an engineering college. The confident girl declared that she wasn't satisfied with her rank and would make another attempt next year. In a Kolkata slum, young Salma Khatun lives with six siblings and gets Rs 3 for each exercise book she binds. She can earn up to Rs 1,000 a month, a sum that can go a long way in supporting her large family. Yet, she prefers to be regular in school than spend long hours binding books.

Things are changing, slowly, for Muslims girls in West Bengal. Since 1993, when the Government of India launched a scheme for modernising madrasa (Islamic seminary) education by offering funds for teaching science, mathematics and social sciences, schools under the West Bengal Board of Madrasa Education have shown positive results, especially in the past three to four years.

In rural West Bengal, for instance, Muslim families have started sending their young girls to stay in city hostels for a better education. When the West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee said he wanted to see more students from madrasas enter modern professions, it inspired the Madrasa Board to set up a Guidance Foundation course especially focused on female students in villages.

This course selects the 12 most talented students in the villages, puts them in city school hostels, aiming to prepare them for higher secondary education and competitive examinations. Besides Bano, Nasreen Mumtaz, daughter of a farmer in Deulia village, Bardhaman district, is a recent beneficiary of this programme.

In urban districts also, the madrasas are trying to bring in change. Recently, the students of Akra High Madarsa for girls (in suburban Kolkata) put up a play for the first time in a city function — propagating small families as a tool to better living. Their participation along with mainstream schools was an encouraging sign. "We have computers in our school," the girls, most of who wanted to pursue a higher education, declared proudly.

According to a 2001 survey, by the International Institute for Population Science, West Bengal is ranked 19th among 26 States in female literacy. What's more disturbing is that the dropout figure for girls (between classes I and X) was as high as 86.14 per cent, mostly in rural areas and largely among the Muslim community.

Let's take the district of Murshidabad. Here, a girl's marriage prospects depend on how many bidis she can roll in a day. Apparently, a girl who can roll 1,000 bidis a day need not be given a dowry, which ranges between Rs 20,000 and Rs 30,000 among the poor families. Such girls are rarely motivated to go to school and study.

"Education and economic independence are the only ways our girls can come out of this exploitative situation which is so rife in our community," says Sarfaraz Ali, head of the Rajabazar Education and Awareness Development Society (READ), an NGO. Most of the workers in his team are women, abandoned or tortured for dowry reasons or victims of talaq (divorce). READ runs classes for poor Muslim boys and girls. In a small room, located in the congested Gas Street of Rajabazar, north Kolkata, young girls and boys squat cheek-by-jowl on the floor. Their teacher, a Muslim girl who has just finished her final-year school examinations, tries hard to retain their attention. When a visitor arrives, a female student shyly recites a poem and a boy enacts a small role — how his drunken father behaves — reflecting the environment he lives in.

"Bringing them to class itself is a problem. They come from Muslim families surviving on daily wages. Most boys work as street vendors and shop assistants, while girls are involved in bookbinding and embroidery. Their parents need a lot of persuading to let their wards `waste' time in a school. The monthly stipend of Rs 100, made available through the National Child Labour Project for special schools is an incentive, but frankly, they earn more by working," says Ali.

However, the issue of secular education in madrasas has upset some people in the Muslim community. A recent Times of India report said that the Madrasa Students' Union and four other Muslim organisations opposed the ongoing attempt of making madrasa education compatible with mainstream education. The report said these organisations felt "it would further undermine traditional, religious and Arabic studies, and compromise the different character of madrasa education". However, with seven hostels in West Bengal already built for gifted village Muslim students, the future should see more girls like Bano qualify for national competitions and reap the real benefits of education.

Women's Feature Service

Picture by Mohammed Yousuf

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