KUDRI, India -- In the brief, cherished lull between waking up and household chores, Seema Mahato, 15, hunched over a crude wooden table, racing to complete her English homework. By the pale yellow light of a kerosene lamp, she softly read aloud from a story called "A Visit to the Zoo," which she had painstakingly copied into a lined notebook. It was 4:30 a.m.
An hour later, the sky had begun to lighten outside the windowless brick house that she shares with her family and several farm animals. Seema reluctantly put away her schoolwork. After fetching water from the neighborhood pump, she squatted in her dirt yard and washed last night's dishes with soap and ash, then headed into the cowshed with a straw basket to collect dung. Soon it would be time for school.
Seema Mahato, left, rides her bike home from school with friends. She got the bike under a plan to boost school attendance among girls by cutting travel time.
(Photos John Lancaster -- The Washington Post)
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The daughter of illiterate low-caste farm workers, Seema struggles to make space for learning. Her chores begin before dawn and resume as soon as she gets home from her 9th-grade classes at a Catholic missionary school. On days off from school, she often does farm work for local landlords for the equivalent of 43 cents a day.
It is a balancing act that doesn't always balance. A welfare agency gave Seema a bicycle under a program to boost school attendance among girls by cutting travel time on lonely country roads. That helped, but other demands have kept her struggling to keep up with her studies. Earlier this year she was nearly pulled out of school by her mother, who wanted her to work in the fields.
Seema's uphill quest for a high school diploma and ultimately a nursing degree -- a goal so audacious that she has yet to mention it to her parents -- is emblematic of one of India's most urgent social challenges: keeping girls in school.
Numerous development studies have shown that improving educational opportunities for girls yields benefits across society. Girls who complete basic schooling are more likely to postpone marriage and children. They raise smaller, better-educated families that in turn contribute to higher living standards. An emphasis on girls' education has been widely cited as a major factor in the economic success of other parts of Asia such as South Korea and Taiwan.
Yet India, for all its economic and scientific successes of recent years, has proved stubbornly resistant to the trend. Girls in India attend school at significantly lower rates than boys, accounting for four in 10 students in grades six through 12, according to the World Bank. India's female adult literacy rate of 45 percent (compared with 68 percent for men) is on a par with Sudan's.
Although attitudes are changing, many parents -- particularly among the rural poor, who still account for most of India's billion-plus people -- fail to see the point of educating daughters who typically marry as teens and leave the house. Sons, by contrast, are regarded as future breadwinners who will take care of their parents in old age.
"Somewhere in their heart of hearts, they do feel that the girl belongs to another family -- she'll be married off, while the son will be with us for the rest of our lives," said Scholastica Kiro, a senior welfare official in Jharkhand state, who helps administer the bicycle program.
But the picture is not without hope. Government programs aimed at boosting girls' access to school -- such as the bicycle initiative -- are starting to narrow the gender gap in education, according to development experts. Government data show that in 1999, the percentage of girls between the ages of six and 14 who were attending school was 74 percent, up from 59 percent just six years earlier.
Meager Circumstances
A cheerful, self-confident girl whose thick wavy hair displays the telltale reddish tint of chronic malnutrition, Seema grew up in Kudri, an isolated farming village of about 80 households roughly 500 miles southeast of New Delhi, the capital. She has a 13-year-old brother and a 12-year-old sister, both of whom are also enrolled in school. An older sister, Rekha, 17, is mentally handicapped and all but helpless. Their home has neither electricity nor running water. A nearby field serves as the latrine.
Like many of their neighbors, Seema's father, Meghnath, and her mother, Vimla, earn the bulk of their living -- about $43 per month -- as laborers at nearby rice paddies and grain fields. "Only when we work do we get grain for the next day," said Meghnath, 45, a thin, weary-looking man with a fringe of unkempt gray hair.
Despite her humble circumstances, Seema is lucky in at least one sense: She lives about three miles from Nirmala High School, an unassuming whitewashed structure that was founded by a Belgian missionary in 1964 and now serves 363 boys and girls, whose classes are segregated by sex.
In morning Hindi class, Seema sat attentively with about 40 other 9th-grade girls -- all wearing white uniforms with their hair plaited and tied in loops with black ribbons -- as teacher Peter Bhengra led students in a spirited discussion of a short story set in an Indian village.
