Sita’s daughters

About 27 km from Patna, in northern Bihar’s Sitamarhi district—Sita Janmabhoomi—a quiet battle is on for female literacy. The district’s figures, among the lowest in the country, are on a slow rise since 1992, when the Bihar Education Project (BEP), funded by UNICEF and the Central and state governments, began (see box).

Lalita Kumari is the most famous face of the BEP’s Mahila Samakhya, a fast-track intensive residential education programme currently on in 10 districts. Her story made it to the cover of UNICEF’s The State of the World’s Children 2004 report released last December.

In Class VIII, Lalita has her future all mapped out: ‘‘I want to remain in Sitamarhi and be a teacher. We must get more girls to study.’’

Lalita already goes around Mahila Samakhya centres in the neighbouring Muzzafarpur, Sheikhpura and Gaya districts teaching other girls karate.

Guddi Kumari, 18, a young widow with a two year-old daughter, has now spent a year on the programme. ‘‘I want to study more and ensure my daughter does not miss out like I did.’’

Gender, caste, privation and social strictures—girls in Bihar are battered by disadvantages every step of the way, says Sangeeta Dutta, district co-ordinator of Sitamarhi’s Mahila Samakhya.

To appreciate the true weight of Sangeeta’s belief that life at the Mahila Samakhya Kendra is nothing less than a revolution, one must make the trip to Lalita’s village, Kanhauli, on the Indo-Nepal border.

Whenever Lalita makes the visit home, it is a bumpy bus drive on a potholed road purporting to be National Highway 74. Followed by a couple of hours of negotiating dusty tracks to reach the farthest edge of the village.

Here Lakshmaniya Tola, an obscure settlement of about 60 families of the Musahar (literal translation: rat-eating) caste, lies buried under the twin weights of apartheid and state neglect.

Despite the daughter’s worldwide fame, Lalita’s family and her community live in darkness, deprived of access to electricity and drinking water. None of the Musahars owns any land, most scrape through as labourers.

Yet the local BEP person, ‘Saheli’ Kanti Devi, she first spotted Lalita’s potential and asked Mahila Samakhya to take her in, remains sunny and spirited.

Each morning, in a small clearing, a blue tarpaulin sheet is hitched up on bamboo poles and her class begins. ‘‘I divide the girls into three groups according to learning skills,’’ says Kanti, a matriculate who works on a monthly pay of Rs 700. ‘‘But we can’t be target-obsessed,’’ says Sangeeta. ‘‘We want long-lasting change and so work with small batches each year of deeply self-motivated girls.’’

However, Mahila Samakhya’s state co-ordinator in Patna Sister Sabeena concedes that the change is just a drop in a large ocean of disadvantage: ‘‘For every Lalita who makes it, there remain thousands deprived of a chance to discover their potential.’’

Nobody would know that better than Lalita’s younger sister, Punita (13). Back in Lakshmaniya Tola, she remains deeply upset that she could not be accommodated in the Mahila Samakhya batch this year.