By Chandan Kumar Sahu
BERHAMPUR: Adolescents through the ‘teen clubs’ celebrated the national girl child day on 24 January. On this occasion the members of teen club mebers organized meetings and rallies at different slums such as Uttaramukhi Street and Jagabandhu Street.
Teen club members conveyed the importance and need of girl child to their parents and communities. Girls touch the heights with success in many sectors like science, technology, politics, defence and social work by innovating ideas that change human lives. But the irony is that our society still believes boys are better than girls. The gender discrimination creates many social problems like child marriage, child trafficking and violence against children and women. On the other hand girl’s education also not that encouraging in our society which is due to the gender differences, poor infrastructure for girls in various institutions (e.g. unavailability of separate toilets for girls in schools).
Keeping all this in mind the adolescents not just celebrated the girl child day but created a sense among the communities, parents that girl child are equally important, they have equal rights and powerful for complete society. They also highlighted issues of female foeticide, poor enrolment of girl child in schools, early girl child marriage, poor menstruation hygiene practice among girls, early pregnancy, maternal death, infant death and other issues related to children and adolescents.
Adolescents urged elected representatives, government and communities to equally take the responsibilities to protect the rights of the girl children and adolescent. They particularly highlighted the role of citizen and various committees like slum committees, youth clubs, mother’s committees and self-help groups and citizen committees like Gaon Kalyan Samiti, School Management Committee, Standing Committees of local self-governments to highlight the issues, monitor public programmes and prioritise the needs and aspirations of the girl children.
In this occasion teen club members such as Puja Nayak, Laxmi Nayak, Priyanka Pattanik and Asima Bisoyi are actively participated and from Youth for Social Development Arghyarupa Nayak, Anita Patra, Mahima Pradhan and Smurti Kumari Sahu facilitated teen club members.
