Sandhya was just 11 when she saw a girl as old as herself getting married to a boy barely in his teens. She remembers the unhappy face of the child bride, who wanted to study but was forced to marry by her ragpicker parents for fear of bigger dowry demand later on.
Visiting her village in Bihar's Nalanda district, Sandhya was anxious about whether she too was headed for a similar fate. She is eternally grateful to NGO Waste Pickers Welfare Foundation for preventing this. The worriless Class VII student now aspires to learn classical dance and become an actress.
Waste Pickers Welfare Foundation set up an informal study centre in a shack among the jhuggis where Sandhya¡¯s family lived. Finding that persuasion went only so far, the NGO began to persuade parents of young girls to sign a hand-written pledge that they would not marry off their daughters before they turned 18.
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Such an assurance would be significant ahead of visits to home districts where the young girls were most vulnerable to family diktat.
Some parents agreed, others gave verbal assurances. Yet the commitments, gathered at parent-teacher meetings in local schools, did work alongside other sustained efforts to increase awareness about education. This experiment in the fly-and-rodent-infested cluster, said Bali Charan, founder of the NGO, is now showing results after a 15-year struggle.
Rakhi, 12, who lives in the same jhuggi cluster knows what bal vivaah (child marriage) entails. She has seen a nine-year-old getting married. Ask her if she will marry before 18 and she has a decisive ¡°no¡± for a response.
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Rakhi wants to grow up to be a police woman. Like Sandhya and Rakhi, many girls in this ragpickers¡¯ colony of 600-odd families in Ghaziabad are benefitting from the power of education and the awareness it generates.
Located between Bhuapur village in Kaushambi and the multi-storey society flats that outline the main highway linking Delhi and NCR, an increasing number of girls from this cluster are enrolling in schools.
A noticeable outcome is a strengthening resolve to marry only after attaining the permissible age of 18 years. The girls are finding important backers in mothers, who are beginning to recognise the ill effects of child marriage, a route parents are forced to take due to poverty, dowry demands and fear of safety for girl children, particularly if they drop out of school.
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Kiran, ragpicker and mother of six, was married at 12. Her own eldest daughter was married at 17 after leaving studies. Kiran now is aware of child marriage and its demerits, and she told TOI that she was okay with her daughters marrying only after they turn 18 and after complete schooling.
Charan said that there are over 200 children who have registered for the campaign in the government-run primary and secondary schools.
¡°Monthly meetings with parents are held when assurances are sought that those going back to their villages will not give their girls away in marriage,¡± the NGO founder said. ¡°Some parents have given us this assurance in writing.¡±
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The older children attend the classes at the non-formal centre at Bhuapur village after school and it is here that awareness-building around social issues like child marriage also happens. The younger children gather at the jhuggi in the middle of the rag-pickers¡¯ cluster for the hand-holding classes in the morning.