Village in literate Kerala denies schooling to HIV+ girl
Pioneer News Service
Kottayam: The State of Kerala boasts of being 100 per cent literate and socially conscious but it fails to show maturity when it comes to the questions of scientific understanding and love for the kind. As a result, a small girl child, stricken with a dreaded disease due to no crime of hers, is kept in uncertainty about her studies.
Pambady village in Kottayam district was in the news almost the same time last year for the wrong reasons and it is so again for the same reasons now. The girl, one of the five HIV-positive children, who had to face the wrath of an entire society in their quest for academic knowledge last year, is now finding it difficult to have her continued education due to the objection from a society of parents.
The five children were denied admission last year in an aided lower primary school run by Christian Church, but a girl from this group, who passed out of Class IV, is now being denied her right to get admitted into Class V at the Government Upper Primary School in Pambady. The headmistress of the school says that she is rendered unable to do anything to help the kid as the entire Parent-Teacher Association is against admitting the child in that school.
The girl child, being looked after by Asha Kiran, a voluntary organisation dedicated to the care and treatment of HIV-positive children, has thus become the most hated person in the eyes of the parents in the whole locality. The concerned authorities at Asha Kiran are waiting for the intervention of Education Minister MA Baby to whom they have submitted a memorandum seeking his help.
It took a lot of will and resolve on the part of the Government, especially Baby and Health Minister PK Sreemathi, and a lot of pressure on the school authorities and the PTA, to get the five kids admitted to the MG Lower Primary School last year. Parents of other children studying in the school had even taken their wards off the school when these five children were admitted there. The ill-fated kids had to be kept away from the school to keep the tempers of several parents cool.
Parents, who do not want the poor HIV-positive girl to mingle with their wards, have taken an adamant stature this year too. The headmistress of the Government Upper Primary School here said the parents were threatening to withdraw their children from the school if the girl was let in.
Caught in a difficult position, the school authorities have already delayed the admission of the child by a week already in the hope that a solution would "come from somewhere". Sources said that the girl had not been allowed to sit in the school in the first week of the academic year in the name of Pravesanotsavam (admission festival). People's representatives and voluntary workers in Pambady said the people, who speak of high human values, were behaving strangely and cruelly with a hapless child.
An office-bearer of the PTA said, "It is true that the girl should have the right to study. But I don't want her to sit with my child, mingling with her, shaking hands with her, sharing the bench with her. I am told that HIV does not get transmitted just like that but who can be sure?"
Authorities at Asha Kiran said that they had anticipated all this trouble and therefore had moved the application for the girl's admission well in advance so that the "school people would get enough time to settle any such issues that might come up". A functionary said, "The school authorities did nothing and now they are crying that they are helpless. But we are sure the Education and Health Ministers are sensible people _ and they have proved it _ and they would do something effectively. Still, we would like the issue to be settled here itself."
June 09, 2008
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