JAIPUR, AUG 29: The children caught the National Women's Commission (NCW) team unprepared. Yesterday, the team visited a village for a public hearing organised by the State Women's Commission in connection with a campaign against child marriages. A few questions from school children concerning the hard realities of their existence left the Commission members stumped.A student of the Government Girls Higher Secondary School at Govindgarh, where the hearing was held, asked NCW chairperson Vibha Parthasarathy: ``Madam, you have said so much about preventing child marriages. Can you adopt an orphaned, poor friend of mine?''The girl, Hansa, narrated the plight of a friend, Santosh, whose father was dead and the elder brother did not give anything from his earnings to support his mother and two sisters. Consequently, the mother stopped sending the girls to school. There wasn't even enough to eat at their home and the mother's main concern now was to somehow marry off her daughters so the girls would do what they could in their marital home.Everyone talks of the need to stop child marriages and send girls to school. But when they go to school, there are no teachers for them nor do they get any books to read from the libraries, the feisty schoolgirl said, as the audience listened and squirmed.The preferred solution to this state of affairs was precisely what the NCW was opposed to and trying to create awareness about. But here, bare awareness of the evils of the system was not enough, it realised. There remained concrete individual and social problems that needed to be addressed first. Parthasarathy conceded the NCW's helplessness in finding a solution to the problem and said that if there was some school-related problem, the villagers should take it up with district officials to have it resolved.Other speakers at the hearing said that the incidence of child marriage has come down with growth of awareness but it has not been possible to stop it completely. They said poverty and backwardness were the main factors responsible for the practice.
