Health- Issues of Uneducated Working Women in...

Health- Issues of Uneducated Working Women in Rural Areas of India

Author Name : Dr Neeta Gupta

ABSTRACT

The rural Indian women are an epitome of strength, who is performing her household duties from dawn to dusk. However, her contribution remains unrecognized. Many after performing her daily chores have to work in their small agricultural land. Men perform operations involving machinery. Agriculture which is the mainstay of the rural Indian economy is sustained for the most part by the female workforce. They are the invisible life line of the agrarian rural community life. Rural women from childhood days have to bear the burden of taking care of younger siblings, cooking, engaging in domestic chores, looking after the fodder of the domestic animals in their parents’ house. They are married off at a very early age. Many Indian rural women are condemned to a life of serfdom, anonymity, facelessness. In rural India, very few women have ownership over land or productive assets. This proves to be a road block in institutional credit. Majority of the agricultural labourers are women. They mainly assigned manual labour. Although access to education has been considered a basic right in India since 2009, many girls in rural India are not attending higher education, or are dropping out of school before completing their primary education. In Rajasthan (state in North India), girls are three times more likely to not attend school compared to their male counterparts . A UNCRC report submitted in 2000, stated that girls living in rural areas of India, are constantly deprived of adequate access to basic health care, nutrition and education. The report even found that families preferred to educate their male child rather than their female child. Evidence for this claim was supported by the statistic that almost one third of the girls who enter formal education in class I (grade 9) drop out before entering class II (grade 10) . 

UNICEF also reported in 2017 that illiterate women in rural areas have especially high rates of young pregnancies, infant and maternal mortality, and overall morbidity. UNICEF’s report states that there are many “barriers to girls’ education, including poverty, child marriage, gender-based violence, and gender biases”. Research also suggests that in many rural communities educating girls is looked down on, and assumed to be a useless endeavor, since many girls are married off before they turn 18. 

As of 2018, Rajasthan, India’s 7th largest state, still has the lowest literacy rate for women at 46% (rural Rajasthani men- 76%). Despite slight increases to Rajasthan’s literacy rate over the years, research has shown that almost 37% of literate women had dropped out of school before completing 8th grade. 

Keywords: rural, women, uneducated, health, India, working , illiterate