The bus ride home from school was the toughest part of Safeena Husain’s day. She remembers it in vivid detail — the walk from her seat to the front of the bus, down the steps, to her house, to the door, and finally ringing the bell. Every step carried the weight of the reminder that she was now home.

What to most children is a happy thought at the fag end of a school day had the opposite effect on young Safeena’s mood. I listen to her sift through her mental archives as she retrieves this memory she’d shelved for years. As I learn, her childhood in Delhi was coloured in tones of poverty, violence, and abuse, and, so, she reasons, “School was my safe space.”

And a safe space of this sort is exactly what she’s been attempting to create for the last 18 years, through ‘Educate Girls’, her NGO that recently won the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award, becoming the first Indian NGO to receive the honour. Calling the classroom “a place of joy”, Safeena shares, “It’s where I could forget everything else. I loved school; it gave me a sense of normalcy.”

And so, one of the most trying phases of her life was when this antidote was snatched away.

Due to personal circumstances, Safeena stopped going to school. She watched her friends breeze through higher classes and college. She points out, “In times like these, you can feel your confidence and self-esteem fall. You think you don’t deserve anything in life. No girl should have to go through it.”

But they do.

In fact, 4.1 million girls went through it between 2020 and 2022, according to a report by UDISE (Unified District Information System for Education Plus), a management information system of the Department of School Education and Literacy, Union Ministry of Education.

Not just in India, but across the world, history bears witness to girls being consigned to the waiting room of education, hoping........

© The Better India