By Poonam Malik:
India as a developed country has achieved a lot and it is on the threshold to become a super power because its youth population is largest in the world, but we should ask to ourselves if we really are developed or not.
People fight to get higher education and even after wining the fight they are losers, because they are helpless and our legal system is to loose to be approached. This is a case study of a Muslim girl who wanted to study and fought real hard but still could not study due to her family’s orthodox practices.
Anwara Begu Mazumdar a 27 year old bright girl from Assam was studying in my collage as an MA student in gender studies, she was a good student and scored good marks throughout, and had also  done B.Ed, because of her ambitions to be a teacher and empower girls to take a better decision for themselves to have a good career and life. She was a sponsored candidate from Nehru Yuva Kendra Sansthan, as she served the sanstahn for more than two years as a Nation Service Volunteer in Assam.
After completing her MA degree she wanted to study further to became a professor, so she applied for MPHIL in different universities and got a call letters from Central University of Hyderabad and Pondicherry University. She then cleared the written papers of both the universities. She wanted to join the Central university of Hyderabad in the women studies department.
After completing the course she did not want to go home and wanted to work. Her father was against her going out of home for studies, as his thought was that Muslim girls should not work and study as their duty is to look after the house, get married and take care of the husband and his family. Till now, she had managed to study because of her mother’s support and had gotten good education – which was her legal right and personal ambition. Her father managed to emotionally blackmail her by narrating false stories of her mother’s ill health – and got her back home. Unfortunately, she was then mistreated, abused and physically tortured, and was refused to go for further studies.
Impact-
Now she is in Assam (most probably) and even after being contacted by us continuously via email, post, calls and sms’s, we haven’t gotten a reply yet. Nobody knows what she is doing, and if she is fine or not .
India will only change when the mentality of the people change in our country especially towards girls, although we have achieved a lot as a country, but individually we are still far far away. To fill this gap youth has to come forward to address the issue, faced by young people.