How cycling set deprived Indian girls on a life-long journey | Bike blog

In Bihar, one of India's poorest and most populous states, half of the women and a quarter of the men are illiterate, and about 90% of its 104 million inhabitants live in rural areas. Life here is particularly difficult for girls, and one of the greatest hindrances to their development is the simple journey to school. For many, the trip is long, expensive and dangerous. But here, in rural Bihar, we recently saw that a two-wheeled solution to the problem has been found. Three years ago the state's new chief minister Nitish Kumar adopted a "gender agenda" and set about redressing his state's endemic gender imbalances in an attempt to boost development in one of India's most backward states. His vision was to bring a sense of independence and purpose to his state's young women, and the flagship initiative of this agenda is the Mukhyamantri Balika Cycle Yojna, a project that gives schoolgirls 2,000 rupees (about £25) to purchase a bicycle. The project's results so far have been extremely promising: in those three years in Bihar alone, 871,000 schoolgirls have taken to the saddle as a result of the scheme. The number of girls dropping out of school has fallen and the number of girls enrolling has risen from 160,000 in 2006-2007 to 490,000 now. Girls like Pinki Kumari (15), a student from the high school in Desari, previously had 14km round trip each day. When she got back home, she would have to help her mother with daily chores. "At the end of the day, it became tiring and attending school became a ritual. I hardly got any time to study," Pinki said. Her father, Anil Sharma, a local electrician, had wanted her to get married early. He had to give up the plan in the face of his daughter's determination to study after she got a free bicycle from the government. Pinki now reaches school in 15 minutes, and is full of hope for her and her family's future. The school we recently visited in the Bihar village of Bumbuar, where we were encircled by a fleet of ambitious young girls on bikes, was also full of success stories, and since the scheme began, regular school attendance among girls has shot up to 90%. In these girls' families, and for the rest of Bihar's rural poor, bicycles used to be reserved either for parents in their daily life, or for older brothers. But now, as many of Bumbuar's girls are attending school more regularly, not only is their knowledge of academic subjects improving, but their hunger for knowledge and a professional future is also increasing. One keen young cyclist we met echoed the opinion and aspirations of many of her schoolmates, saying: "Every morning I look forward to going to school. When I'm older I want to go to university." This leap in the village girls' education and aspirations represents a quantum leap from their parents' era: just four of the 70 schoolgirls we met have mothers who made it to the tenth grade. And on a wider scale, Bihar is not alone in this initiative. In at least four other Indian states, from Punjab to Tamil Nadu, Kumar's vision is becoming a shared reality. Kumar succinctly sums up the initiative's aim and all it stands for: "Nothing gives me a greater sense of fulfilment of a work well done than seeing a procession of school-bound, bicycle-riding girls. It is a statement for social forward movement, of social equality and of social empowerment." • Eddie Wright is communications and outreach officer for the European Parliamentary Forum on Population and Development