Officials announced on Monday that one year after the launch of the ‘Kanya Shiksha Pravesh Utsav’ campaign by Women and Child Development (WCD), a significant achievement has been made in bringing out-of-school girls back into the formal education system. Since July 2022, the ministry, in collaboration with the Education Ministry, has successfully reintegrated 1 lakh girls, who had previously dropped out of school, back into mainstream education.
The primary focus of the campaign was on girls aged between 11 and 14 years, and it involved the participation of Anganwadis, which played a crucial role in identifying out-of-school girls as part of the initiative.
As the Scheme for Adolescent Girls in 11-14 age group was not getting traction earlier, “We decided to club together three programmes under a new scheme — anganwadi services, poshan abhiyan and scheme for adolescent girls — since all these had the same nutritional targets,” says an official.
In this new scheme, the official pointed out, “we have also created a new category: adolescent girls between 14 and 18 years. This is an extremely important category to ensure that generational malnutrition is prevented. If an adolescent girl’s nutritional requirements are taken care of, chances of her giving birth to a malnutritioned child when she is of child-bearing age is reduced.”