Our ‘Mission Hazaar’ initiative is our commitment to bridging the sex ratio and making it equal again. The initiative engages people across Haryana, a state with a severely skewed sex ratio of 830:1000.
With a strategic partnership with the national “Beti Bachao Beti Padhao” campaign, we have reached out to 17.7 million people with mass media and community programmes in the state.
In Haryana, our project Taaron Ki Toli has witnessed great success. As a part of this programme, we created a 3-year gender-sensitization curriculum with the Ministry of Education, reaching 150 schools and over 18000 children – encouraging kids to question gender norms and build empathy.
Additionally, we have trained over 2500 frontline health workers to combat gender-biased sex selection in communities and enabled over 10,000 young people to work as champions of change and help address the issue of sexual harassment in schools.
Programme Evaluation
Our Taaron Ki Toli school programme was evaluated for two-and-a-half years by the acclaimed Abdul Lateef Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), and the resultant indicators were incredibly positive. The research revealed a significant shift in gender attitudes and behaviours of both girls and boys, interestingly, more so in the case of boys who were a part of the programme. It also highlighted increased positive interaction with the opposite sex and safer local travel for girls.
This vote of confidence has propelled us to expand this working model to other parts of the country as well, with an aim to ensure gender sensitization is an integral part of school curriculum all over India.
