INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY (8TH MARCH).

• Recently, the government launched a nation-wide campaign called KanyaShikshaPraveshUtsav on the eve of the International Women’s Day (8th March).
• The aim of the campaign is to bring back four lakh out-of-school adolescent girls in the 11-14 years age group into the education system.
• The project aims to work on a complete system for out-of-school girls by building on existing schemes and programmes such as Schemes for Adolescent Girls (SAG), BetiBachaoBetiPadhao (BBBP), and National Education Policy (NEP).
• The campaign is being steered by the Ministry of Women And Child Development in partnership with the Ministry of Education.
• The campaign focuses on convergence and coordination between ministries, departments and states.
• The campaign will be implemented as part of the BBBP project, with the primary beneficiaries being over 4,00,000 out-of-school adolescent girls.
• Over 400 districts across all states will be funded under the BetiBachaoBetiPadhao Scheme for grassroots level outreach and awareness generation to sensitise communities and families to enrol adolescent girls in schools.
• Further, funding from SamagraShikshaAbhiyan, and Anganwadi workers (AWWs) will be further incentivised for counseling and referring out of school adolescent girls.
• It strives to collect data on out-of-school girls, based on their visits to anganwadicentres for nutrition, nutrition education and skilling.
• Bringing out-of-school girls back to the education system has been the target since the Right to Education Act was enacted (2009).
• The need has arisen because the Scheme For Adolescent Girls (SAG), which initially took care of out-of-school girls, was getting less traction.

SOURCE: THE HINDU,THE ECONOMIC TIMES,MINT