Beti Bachao Beti Padhao
Highlights
The Union Ministry of Women and Child Developmenthas launched a new initiative to spread awareness about the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (BBBP-Save the girl child, Educate the girl child) Scheme of the Ministry.
The Union Ministry of Women and Child Developmenthas launched a new initiative to spread awareness about the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (BBBP-Save the girl child, Educate the girl child) Scheme of the Ministry. The initiative has been launched in partnership with Celltick Mobile Media India Pvt. Ltd. to generate awareness about BBBP Scheme to an estimated 100 million mobile users in India.
On January 22, 2015, PM Narendra Modi in Panipat, Haryana, launched twin programmes of "Beti bachao, beti padhao" and "Sukanya Samriddhi account" in a bid to encourage birth and education of girls and tackle the abysmally low child sex ratio in the country. The trend of decline in the Child Sex Ratio (CSR), defined as number of girls per 1000 of boys between 0-6 years of age, has been unabated since 1961. The decline from 945 in 1991 to 927 in 2001 and further to 918 in 2011 is alarming.
A 2012 UNICEF report has ranked India 41st among 195 countries.
There has been a marked improvement in female literacy as per Census 2011. Though the male literacy is still higher at 80.9 percent than female literacy at 64.6 percent, the increase has been 10.9 percent compared to 5.6 percent of the males. The new scheme aims to address the issue of declining figures through a mass campaign targeted at changing social mindset and creating awareness.
The scheme was initiated with an initial corpus of Rs 100 crore. The objectives are: Prevention of gender biased sex selective elimination; Ensuring survival & protection of the girl child; and Ensuring education and participation of the girl child. To strengthen the cadre of teacher educators by providing early career choice to prospective teachers and to fill the vacancies in teacher education institutions, a new four-year integrated programme, i.e. BA/B Ed, and BSc./B Ed has been introduced.
The hashtag #SelfieWithDaughter was promoted on social media in June 2015, which started when the sarpanch of the village Bibipur in Haryana took a selfie with his daughter and posted on Facebook on 19 June 2015. The hashtag garnered worldwide fame.
India has about 100 million young people in the age group of 15-18 years, majority of which could land up in unorganised sector as there are educational and age requirement for entry into most vocational skills Programmes. There is a need for research into the type of knowledge or skills required to address this issue.
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