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Breaking Barriers

A Step towards Self Reliance

	Parwati Mahto

Parwati Mahto, age 38 years, village Mahuldih (Sonua , a typical tribal dominated area) was married some 25 years back , when she was just 13 years old with Mahesh. He is a truck driver by profession.  Parwati was illiterate as their family members were not interested to send her to school even before and after marriage. Her family members used to say, education is not necessary for women, as they are not required to do jobs. After all they should look after their family and have keen interest in management of household chores. With these prevalent thoughts, she could not attain school during her childhood and after marriage. And as a result she cannot read or even write. This made her dependent on her husband.

But who knows, when life will turn up and she will have to suffer a lot. Yes, after losing her husband in accident, she had no option to survive and conditions pushed her to look out for some alternatives to cater to her family needs. Her parents too were not as financial strong as they could have helped her. They had also mortgaged their land and home to the moneylenders at the time of marriage of Parwati. Subsequently, they had the burden to borrow as the moneylenders were changing high amount of interest rate. Such conditions subjected to loss her confidence and decided to suicide with her two girls child.

Meanwhile, organisation had initiated a unique program called Condensed Course for adult women. As after conducting series of sensitisation meetings with community members, villagers had come across about programme interventions and appreciated a lot for introducing its holistic approach. This programme was not only meant to educate adult women but also used to offer vocational training on different trades after identifying individual needs and demand. This programme was helping out those adults by two ways. First, this programme was making them friendly with words, alphabets, counting, etc. These practices were enabled those adult to understand and propelled to perform small addition, subtraction, multiplication and division and on other side the programme was all set to arrange some income to supplement households chores by providing vocational training.

After getting into this programme of adult education by the organisation and subsequently attained training for six months, now Parwati can perform small mathematical operation and can read or write text of English, Hindi also. Moreover, she had been trained in sewing and stitching. Now, she procures order from villages and other firm and delivers the products. She is very happy now and conveys her wishes and thanks to the organisation for taking up such an initiative for making the lives of women and adult sustainable and changes the perception of community that women can not be a productive. But introduction of such programme proved that women can also be a productive and can perform better in all walk of life.