For a girl in rural India, education is a difficult pursuit

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Anuradha Rathore knows of no women doctors in her native village or its surrounding area.

Among her 100 classmates at the Sampurnanand Medical College in Jodhpur, she is one of 30 females.

The 20-year-old medical student grew up in Kansera, a remote village in Rajasthan, India's largest state. At that time, children were able to go to school only up to the fifth year of primary school, Rathore said. "Nothing beyond that."

In the last couple of years, educational opportunities have improved there: A coed school now goes up to grade 8.

While India's economy booms, educational opportunities remain out of grasp for large numbers of rural poor, especially girls, according to international agencies and researchers.

In Rathore's village, girls are not expected to get an education, and many end their schooling at grade 6 or 7, she said, referring to 12 to 14-year-olds.

"It is basically the old school of thought," Rathore said in a telephone interview from Jodhpur, "that a girl is to be married and studying is a waste of money and resources, and there is no need for girls to study beyond a certain level."

Illiteracy is the outcome. In Rajasthan, 44 percent of all females are literate compared to 76 percent of males, the census found.

Many parents want to keep boys and girls separate in schools beginning at the intermediate education level, says Shrimohan Arora, school manager at the Amar Chand Kanya Intermediate College for girls in Atrauli, Uttar Pradesh state.

The alternative might be no school for girls, Arora acknowledged, adding that many parents want their daughters to attend Amar Chand Kanya.

Even if the parents didn't care about girls mixing with boys, obstacles would remain for the teenage girl, Arora said.

"For intermediate education, there are hardly any coed schools around," Arora said. "For boys, there are many schools." The closest school for girls only recently opened and is 10 kilometers (6 miles) away, he added.

"That her entire family came behind her as a girl and believed that as a girl she could do this is also quite incredible."
Rathore's desire is to work with the government and serve as a doctor at the village level. Not necessarily in her own village of Kansera, she said, but "any village."