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Digital Gender Atlas for girls' education in India launched

The Ministry of Human Resource Development, Department of School Education and Literacy, presented the Digital Gender Atlas for advancing girls' education in India to the media in New Delhi on Monday. The tool, which has been developed with the support of UNICEF, will help identify low performing geographic pockets for girls, particularly from marginalised groups such as scheduled castes, schedule tribes and Muslim minorities, on specific gender related education indicators.

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The Ministry of Human Resource Development, Department of School Education and Literacy, presented the Digital Gender Atlas for advancing girls' education in India to the media in New Delhi on Monday. The tool, which has been developed with the support of UNICEF, will help identify low performing geographic pockets for girls, particularly from marginalised groups such as scheduled castes, schedule tribes and Muslim minorities, on specific gender related education indicators.

The Atlas is placed on the Ministry of Human Resource and Development (MHRD) website and available and ready to use by the states/districts/blocks education administrators or any other interested group. In order to plan and execute educational interventions, the purpose of the Gender Atlas is to help identify and ensure equitable education with a focus on vulnerable girls, including girls with disabilities.

To ensure this is feasible, the Gender Atlas has been developed as a hands-on management tool to enable critical decisions and actions in pockets where gaps are to be met. The Atlas provides comparative analysis of individual gender related indicators over three years and that enables a visual assessment of the change and an understanding of whether some intervention introduced in a geography at a particular point in time has worked or not.

It is constructed on an open source platform with an inbuilt scope of updating data by authorized persons to retain its dynamic character.

Using available government data such as the Unified District Information System for Education (U-DISE) data (2011-2014), Census 2011 data and District Level Health Survey (DLHS) 2007-08, the Gender Atlas enables the user to navigate between geographical representation and numeric data at state, district and block levels and gives information on key indicators for girls' education at primary, upper primary and secondary level.

No primary data has been generated for the development of the atlas. India has achieved high enrolment rates for girls at primary and upper primary levels of schooling. However, at the secondary level girls' enrolment remains lower. While in upper primary the representation of girls in the total enrolment is 48.66 percent, the percentage in secondary is 47.29 percent.

Girls comprise half the population of school age children, and therefore, it is important to understand the multiple vulnerabilities they face in different areas in order to plan and prioritise inclusive interventions.

The main components of the 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 the low sex ratio districts selected under 'Beti Bachao Beti Padhao' programme.

Vrinda Sarup, the Secretary of School Education and Literacy, was also present on the occasion. Additional Secretary (School Education and Literacy), and other senior officers and dignitaries from the Ministry of HRD as well as the UNICEF were also present on the occasion. 

Also Read: Evil of female foeticide needs to be eradicated, says HRD Minister Smriti Irani

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