NEW DELHI // A small village campaign aimed at persuading parents to prize their daughters is in the spotlight after prime minister Narendra Modi praised it in his monthly radio address to the nation.
The campaign, called Selfie With Daughter, was started on June 9 by the sarpanch, or elected head, of Bibipur village in India’s Haryana state.
Sunil Jaglan, 33, urged villagers to take photographs of themselves with their daughters and send them to him in a text message.
The best photograph, Mr Jaglan promised, would win a trophy and a prize of 2,100 rupees (Dh121).
In his 20-minute radio talk on Sunday, Mr Modi said Mr Jaglan’s idea was “an interesting initiative”.
“Because of this, every father wanted to get a selfie clicked with his daughter,” Mr Modi said. “I really liked this concept … I request all of you now to click a selfie with your daughters and post it on the internet with the hashtag SelfieWithDaughter.”
Mr Modi said the campaign fit in with his government’s Beti Bachao Beti Padhao — Save Daughters, Educate Daughters — programme.
The programme emphasises the importance of sending girls to school, in a country where a daughter is still often seen as a liability and as inferior to a son.
This thinking comes from a time before women began to enter the workforce in larger numbers.
A son was seen as a future breadwinner but a daughter was an expense, since a dowry would have to be paid when she married.
After Mr Modi suggested the hashtag, #SelfieWithDaughter became the top trend on Twitter in India on Sunday.
Mr Jaglan said he listened to Mr Modi’s radio address every month and was dumbstruck when he heard the prime minister mention his name on Sunday.
"I had no idea that this was going to happen," he told The National. "Nobody from his office had called me to tell me, or anything like that."
The father of two young girls, Mr Jaglan has been pushing for women’s empowerment in Bibipur for several years now.
“I’ve organised little seminars, I’ve put up advertisements around the village,” he said. “Every year, around the time of my birthday, I have tried to do some project like this, to involve everybody.”
The idea of the selfie was inspired by the ubiquity of the mobile phone in his village of 5,000, he said.
“If you take a photo with your daughter, it’s like you’re showing some pride in her. In some way, it will motivate you to take better care of her.”
Word of the campaign in Bibipur spread, and Mr Jaglan said that since its launch, he had received more than 1,000 pictures, some from villages in states as far away as Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh.
“I knew people had heard of this through text message, but I would never have imagined it would reach somebody as powerful as the prime minister.”
In his radio address, Mr Modi said it was heartening to see such a campaign emerge in Haryana.
According to the 2011 census, Haryana has the country’s worst gender ratio, with 879 women per 1,000 men — compared to the Indian average of 943 women per 1,000 men.
Kerala fares the best among India’s states, with 1,084 females per 1,000 males.
The illegal practices of female foeticide and infanticide — in which female foetuses are aborted and baby girls killed — are rampant across Haryana.
There are no government figures for these crimes since they are usually carried out secretly.
A study published in the journal Issues in Law and Medicine in 2012, by a researcher working at the Sultan Sharif Ali Islamic University in Brunei Darussalam, estimated that more than a million female foetuses are aborted in India every year.
Foeticide is not restricted to poor families, said Ranjana Kumari, director of the Centre for Social Research in New Delhi, which focuses on women’s rights.
“Even in richer areas like Punjab, Delhi and Haryana, they’ve always had a tradition of discriminating against the girl child,” Ms Kumari said. “As families become wealthier, they are more and more unwilling to give shares of their property to their daughters.”
A daughter from a wealthy family must also give a larger amount in dowry, she said.
Mr Jaglan said his efforts, as well of others in the village council in Bibipur, have had promising results.
Virtually no girls are pulled out of school now — a massive change from four years ago, when two out of five girls would be forced by their parents to drop out before they reached the 10th grade.
Women are more empowered and they speak up for their rights, Mr Jaglan added.
“But I wouldn’t call this sort of thing a success,” he said. “We can’t count anything as a success until we succeed in changing these realities across the country.”
ssubramanian@thenational.ae