SCHOOLS VALUE DAD’S WORD OVER MOM’S

A young mother stepped into a school with many hopes for her little girl. But when she tried to enroll her child, she was told she’d need an NOC from the father. He was abroad.

Aswathy Chitra Nair, then a little girl, remembered that day more than two decades later, when as a mother, she went to apply for her son’s passport. She was asked to get an NOC from the dad too.

Aswathy, finance controller of Dr Fixit at Pidilite, fought it for a bit and asked the passport officer what would happen if the father wasn’t in the picture. Apparently they hadn’t thought of such a picture.

Mothers in the state find it tough to get a passport for their child or even an admission to school, when they go alone. Their parenthood apparently has little value without the father’s presence. The passport rule, however, has been relaxed in December 2016, and single parents could apply for their children’s passports without hassle. Aswathy’s comment came when she heard about a friend’s plight while admitting her little boy to school. The friend - Indu Lekshmi - had written an post on Facebook. “I heard a funny thing that a mother has no right to take admission from any schools for her child. If she should in the absence of the child’s father, she needs an ‘authorisation letter’ from the father. And this is a respected system and the funnier thing is no one even finds anything wrong with it.”