Pauri Garhwal district’s nod to gender rights: girl of the house gets nameplate

Pauri Garhwal district’s nod to gender rights: girl of the house gets nameplate

The nameplate outside the single-storey house in Mathana village, in Uttarakhand’s hilly Pauri Garhwal district, reads ‘Aarti Niwas’. “It’s exciting when people now knock on the door and ask, ‘yeh Aarti ji ka ghar hai?’ The postman, courier guy and others ask, ‘Aarti ji ghar pe hain?’ This makes me feel very important,” says the 21-year-old.

The nameplate, part of a programme called ‘Ghaur ki Pachyan, Nauni ku Nau (Identity of the house, in the name of the daughter)’, is an effort by the district administration to create awareness about gender rights and property ownership among women and their families.

Pauri Garhwal, a district in Uttarakhand that has traditionally seen a high outward migration to the plains and to other states, has a healthy sex ratio of 1,103 women to every 1,000 men, according to Census 2011. But it’s the child sex ratio (0-6 years), an indicator of early gender discrimination, that is worrying: at 904, it is way below the state average of 963.

The administration, which has been reaching out to families and convincing them to display the names of their women members, has so far given nameplates to over 150 houses in three villages in Khirsu, Pauri and Yamkeshwar blocks.

District Chief Development Officer (CDO) Ashish Bhatgain said the programme has been started under the mass awareness component of the Centre’s ‘Beti bachao beti padhao’ programme.

Aarti’s mother Shobha says that when officials of the administration told them about the programme, she had no hesitation in proposing the name of the second of her three children, who is doing her Master’s in sociology — Shobha’s eldest child, Manish, a Class 12 dropout, is looking for a job, while her youngest, Shivani, is doing her graduation.

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