Beaten And Almost Forced Into A Child Marriage, This 16-Year-Old Girl Fought Her Entire Village So She’d Get Educated
For two weeks, the Marathas of Ahmednagar, Maharashtra’s largest district fought a battle they were destined to lose, that against a headstrong 16 year old girl.
She resisted violence, social pressure and fear
Even though she had refused to marry, her father forced her into marriage. Despite an attempt to beat her into submission, the girl, refused. And then she reached out to local NGO Tara Mobile Creche (TMC) with a frantic SOS message. The NGO provides child care facilities to the children of construction workers. Pranita Madkaikar TMC CEO told the Indian Express that they were compelled to respond: “She said she wanted to study… and she wanted us to take her away from home. We called her mother and spoke to the girl.” She had been a member of the NGO since the age of nine, and they’d helped her achieve her academic dreams.
“Her parents were from Nagar, and she was being looked after by her grandparents who were construction workers,” Lalita Kamble, assistant programme coordinator told the newspaper. “We got her admitted to class 2 in a local school. Soon, her marks improved, and she started scoring exceptionally well in mathematics. We then put her in a residential school so she would not have to move about as construction workers keep moving from place to place based on the work they get.”
