A total 114 villages in Odisha have been declared child-marriage free as of January 7 2020 and many more are in line.
But this story of change began in a village named Rugudipali in west Odisha’s Subarnapur district with support from the courageous Gitanjali Rana, an anganwadi worker in the area.
Action Aid, a non-profit that works on child and women’s rights, has been spearheading the campaign against child marriage with the support of UNICEF in 15 districts of Odisha with a high burden of child marriage as indicated by the previous National Family Health Survey.
Gitanjali participated in some of these sensitisation programmes over the last few years. As a frontline worker, these workshops to strengthen the institutional mechanism to prevent child marriages gave her the interest and ability to do something different.
Thus, when the 15-year-old granddaughter of villager Gyana Rana approached her and shared that she was being pressured to give up her studies and get married, Gitanjali encouraged her to follow her dreams and stood beside her.
Gitanjali had already discussed the idea of making her village child-marriage free. She said, gave her courage to interact with families and community leaders against child marriage. She also learnt the procedures to intervene and stop a child marriage and mobilise the villagers to become an ally against the social evil.
In the case of Gyana Rana’s granddaughter as well, Gitanjali tried to convince the girl’s family against marrying her off. She made them aware of the negative impacts of the practice on mental and physical health of a girl child.
Initially, the she faced opposition from all fronts but that is in the past. Today, the girl and many others like her in this village are continuing their studies.
No child marriages have been solemnised in the year 2019. On January 6 2020, Rugudipalli was declared ‘child-marriage free’. They have also vowed not to allow underage marriages ever again.
The villagers have gone a step further to create enabling environment for adolescents so that they can continue their education and pursue a career of their choice. This will ultimately strengthen their voices to say no to child marriage.
A total of 962 villages in Subarnapur district have so far pledged to end child marriage.
At the event to declare Rugudipali child-marriage free, Monisha Banerjee, collector and district magistrate of Subarnapur, said, “It is not an easy task to change the mindset of people to let the girls make decisions regarding their marriage. Creation of social responsibility is required to enable girls to fulfil their dreams.”
She urged this endeavour to be taken forward as a campaign in the district and to declare more such villages as child-marriage free. After Rugudipali, 12 more villages from the district joined this list.
On June 12 2020, the Women & Child Development and Mission Shakti Department of Odisha shared the incident of Rugudipali as a success story with all the district collectors.
The effort was appreciated by stating that the Subarnapur district administration has taken an innovative step in convergence action to make the community responsible to prevent child marriage. The department also requested all the collectors to take similar steps.
The Women & Child Development and Mission Shakti Department launched the State Strategic Action Plan in October 2019 to end child marriage with an objective to make Odisha child-marriage free by 2030.
Persistent efforts to motivate parents, influential persons, communities not to marry their girls before the legal age worked. As a result, there is no child marriage in the village Rugudipali and now subsequently in other 113 villages.
A lot of effort has gone in putting the girls back in school and engage them in skill development programmes. These stories of courage are now reaching other parts of the state and encouraging them to make their villages child-marriage free. The little step by Rugudipalli villagers is paving the way in making it possible.
Receive Daily Updates
Recent Posts
Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.