Girl child sop finds few takers

The University Grants Commission's single girl child scholarship scheme hasn't found too many takers in states with low sex ratio. But it is a huge hit in states with higher sex ratio.

Published on: Feb 11, 2006, 19:38:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The University Grants Commission's single girl child scholarship scheme hasn't found too many takers in states with low sex ratio. But it is a huge hit in states with higher sex ratio.

In the final list of awardees declared by UGC on Wednesday, Kerala - where women outnumbered men according to the 2001 Census - bagged the maximum number of scholarships (about 30 per cent of the total 1,613 students selected). The other southern states weren't far behind. Commission officials said Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka also bagged a handsome number of scholarships. All states have very good sex ratios with very low incidence of female feticide.

Apart from the south, the scheme got a good response in West Bengal and Maharashtra. But UGC secretary M.C. Sharma said this was more due to the high literacy rate in these states than the sex ratio link. "As the scheme is for college or university-going students, the response would have been good in states with extremely good literacy rate," he said. Apart from a healthy sex ratio, Kerala has an absolute literacy rate. Tamil Nadu, along with West Bengal, has a literacy rate of 90%.

But officials are worried about the poor response in states with low sex ration and poverty. "The response wasn't very good," an official said, adding that it might be because higher education institutions here failed to publicise the scheme.

Haryana, which has the lowest sex ratio in the country, recorded the least number (25) of girl students who qualified for scholarships. Delhi, also with a poor sex ratio, didn't fare too well either. Only around 30 girls from a city of over 1.5 crore people got scholarships. The response was poor in Bihar, Jharkhand and Rajasthan too.

Under the scheme, students are awarded scholarships for full-time courses. The eligibility criteria: you have to be a single girl child and get admission in a recognised institution. Each recipient is granted Rs 2,000 per month for a period of two years, according to Sharma.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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