Importance of educating the Girl Child

Education in essence, has two main objectives; to instill broad based knowledge, including professional skills, which enables a person to deal with the material demands of his/her life, and secondly, to make him or her a particular kind of person - a person who can live at peace with himself and his fellow human beings and in harmony with animate and inanimate nature.

Looked at in this manner, education becomes a very powerful instrument for protection and promotion of human rights if right type of education is provided to all right from the beginning. Education helps a person grow cognitively,

intellectually and emotionally and enables a person to take right decisions on the basis of logic and reason. It is my firm belief that if women are to be empowered and their human rights protected and promoted in India, we will have to concentrate on educating the girl child who is often discriminated against and whose rights are relegated to background in comparison to those of the male child and the irony of all this is that she is not even aware of the prevailing situation which undermines her worth as an individual and makes her a second grade citizen.