Digital Gender Atlas launched in India to promote Girl’s Education

In order to advance girl’s education in India the ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD), Department of School Education and Literacy has launched the Digital Gender Atlas in front of the media on 09 March in New Delhi. UNICEF would help in establishing the tool that would help in identifying the low performing geographic pockets for girls specially girls from the marginalized sections such as scheduled castes, schedule tribes and Muslim minorities.

The Atlas would be placed on the website of Ministry of Human Resource and Development (MHRD) and would make it available and ready to use for the various states/districts/block education administrators or any of the groups that are interested in using the facility. The focus of the Gender Atlas is to help in identifying the girls with vulnerabilities and girls with disabilities so that ensuring equitable education could turn out to be a reality.

With the help of the Atlas comparative analysis of the individual gender related indicators would get used over the period of three years. This would enable the concerned department to get a visual assessment of the change and thus they could understand whether there has been any considerable change felt after the intervention or not. The atlas is built on an open source platform and thus allows the authorized persons to retain its dynamic character by constantly updating the same.

According to statistics, enrolment rates of girls at primary and upper primary level has shown growth in the last few years but the enrolment in the secondary level has remained considerably low.  The main components of the newly launched Gender Atlas are: Composite gender ranking, Trend Analysis of Gender Indicators, Vulnerabilities based on educational indicators in districts with substantial tribal, schedule caste, minority population in educationally backward blocks and in left wing extremist districts, and low sex ratio districts that were selected under ‘Beti Bachao Beti Padhao’ programme.

Important Points

• HRD Ministry has launched the Digital Gender Atlas to help girls get right education in India
• UNICEF would help in establishing the tool
• The Atlas would be placed on the website of Ministry of HRD