THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT
Payal Jangid (17), Tara Banjara (16) and Lalita Duhariya (15) are the success stories of the Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA), an initiative of Noble laureate Kailash Satyarthi. Jangid was recently conferred the Changemaker Award by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in recognition of her work towards abolishing child marriage in her village Hinsla in Rajasthan. The village is categorised as a “child-friendly” village under the BBA’s flagship programme Bal Mitra Gram (BMG), meant to create an empowered ecosystem in villages where the rights of children are protected. Satyarthi along with his wife, Sumedha, selects a village and works on making it child-friendly by engaging with children already in schools. Launched in 2001, BBA has set up 540 BMG centres in six states in India.
In 2012, BMG picked Payal’s Hinsla village. Payal, then a mere 10 years old, began participating in the Bal Panchayat set up by the project and became its pradhan within a year. She once led a delegation of students to speak to the sarpanch asking for more teachers for the government school she went to and, after much persistence, won. Around the same time, Payal, along with her 14-year-old elder sister, resisted pressure from her family to get married and now is part of a campaign to discourage other families from marrying off their children at an early age. That was the beginning of her fight against child marriage.
The ripple effect of Payal’s agitation reached Tara Banjara, then 9, of Neemani village, who started questioning her engagement to a man and joined an informal school set up by Bal Ashram, a rehabilitation and training centre started by BBA. Tara, eldest of seven children in her family, went on to score 62 per cent in her class X exams. Success stories like hers made Bal Ashram set up nine more schools exclusively for children from the Banjara community. Tara is now involved in motivating street children to study and their parents to break from their centuries-old tradition of travelling like nomads and seek land rights from government. She won the Reebok Fit to Fight Award along with Lalita Duhariya of Dera village, a Dalit student who has been fighting to end discriminatory behaviour in her village. Lalita is now the national president of all Bal Panchayats across India. ■
“CHILDREN LIKE US NEED A LOT OF ENCOURAGEMENT SINCE IT IS DIFFICULT FOR US TO GET PAST OUR SUFFERINGS” —TARA BANJARA