"Our daughter has started earning for us from the age of six," a man told me in Hindi as I helped him fill her admission form for the first grade in the municipal school where I taught. He was referring to the Delhi government's six-year-old Laadli scheme.
Launched in 2008, the scheme gives parents a cash incentive to send their daughters to school. It works on a conditional cash transfer system that puts money into a fixed deposit opened in the girl’s name.
The first incentive of Rs 10,000 comes when the girl is born, Rs 11,000 if she is born in a government hospital. Subsequent instalments of Rs 5,000 each come in when she is admitted to grades 1, 6 and 9. Once she passes the 10th grade, another Rs 5,000 is deposited. The final incentive arrives when she is admitted into the 12th grade. By then, when the girl is about 18 years old, the fixed deposit and interest total nearly Rs 1 lakh.
While launching the scheme, the government claimed it would be a turning point. More girls would go to school, it said, because families would now view them as assets, not liabilities, and would not discriminate against them. But in the two years that I taught in an all-girls municipal school in Delhi, as part of a teaching fellowship, I saw that while Laadli might have succeeded in getting parents to admit their girls to primary schools, it failed to keep them in classrooms.
Since it was launched, the Delhi government’s Laadli scheme has had an average dropout rate of nearly 42 percent. Its fundamental flaw is that it emphasises attendance without monitoring what the girls are learning. By the time the girls get to secondary school, some of them drop out because of low learning levels. That’s when they also drop out of the scheme.
This scheme might hold crucial lessons for the Modi government's girl child initiatives, launched on January 22.
My school was in the heart of one of Delhi's largest slums. Most families in this neighbourhood qualify for the Laadli scheme's two main pre-requisites: they have been in Delhi for three years or more and their annual income does not exceed Rs 1 lakh.
I taught a class of 36 girls in the 2nd and 3rd grades. Many of their fathers worked as daily wage labourers and the mothers did odd jobs, such as stitching for small garment factories. For families like these, the scheme's first incentive of Rs 5,000 rupees was considerable but not enough to negate the disincentives of sending a girl to school.
Take the example of Saroj. The ten-year-old was her parents' youngest daughter. She had an older sister, who was 14 years old, and a brother, who was only two. Her older sister had dropped out of school after the 8th grade.
A diligent student, Saroj barely missed a day in 2nd grade. But as we moved to 3rd grade, she started skipping school regularly. When she didn’t come for an entire week, I decided to visit her home. Saroj’s father is a vegetable seller. When I got to her house, she was helping him clean vegetables for his afternoon sale. As soon as she saw me, she ran towards me saying, "Sorry, didi."
Saroj’s mother took me inside and apologetically explained that it had been a tough week for them. She had left home to help her husband with his vegetable cart because he had unwell. Because Saroj was now old enough to help with chores, she and her sister took care of the house, while the parents stepped out to make a living. "They are now mature enough to lend me a hand,” she said.
I tried to explain why Saroj should not miss school for such long periods. I showed her the lessons covered in that week and said that if Saroj did not catch up, it would affect her performance in the exams.
The mother understood and promised to send Saroj to school from the next week. Before I left, Saroj’s mother asked if this would affect her "Laadli ki rakam", namely the deposits. I wanted to say "yes" but I would have been lying, given what happens in these schools.
Motivated by misplaced sympathy, a senior staff teacher advised me to keep marking all the "laadlis" present, despite their prolonged absence. This would allow them to enter secondary school, when the next installment of Laadli funds would be deposited. But this apparently charitable attitude actually revealed the school authorities' lack of concern for girls' education. Most of them saw their dropping out as the inevitable fate of a girl growing up in a poor family and feel counselling parents is of no use.
"If they cannot learn properly at school," the teacher said, "at least let them earn something for their parents." She meant well but it shocked me to know that the scheme was perceived as a source of income, not just by parents, but by some teachers as well.
Saroj did come to school, but only after two weeks. She struggled with her schoolwork. Her excitement withered as she was constantly trying to make up for time lost in the classroom.
It was a familiar pattern. Saroj wasn’t the only one who would miss school for weeks to help out with housework or to babysit young siblings, mostly boys. Most of my colleagues struggled with families who weren’t concerned about the learning gap that widened each day the girl stayed away from school. Yet year after year, many such "laadlis" were promoted to the next grade without actually learning anything.
Last week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a national programme, the 'Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao' programme, to tackle gender inequality. Yet he hasn't spelt out how it will be implemented. I wonder whether his government has taken stock of the failures of existing schemes. By equating a girl’s right to learn with the money she brings home, the Laadli scheme, for instance, has done little to change the mindset of discrimination.
I wish the government had poured in more thought and not just more money in to its programme, which at the moment sounds little more than a clever slogan.
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