Though the Bihar Government has launched its karate training programme for middle schoolgirls with the purpose of making them capable to teach lessons to eve teasers, the scheme is grappling with the challenge of finding adequate number of girl master trainers as several of them are not showing very keen interest in training these girls in the rural areas of the State.
The State has fixed the target of training 50 girl students from each middle school associated with 510 Kasturba Gandhi Awasiya Balika Vidyalays, spread across the State.
These girl students have the tendency of dropping out from their schools once they pass out their fifth standard but now Karate training will increase their confidence level substantially as they can now defend themselves from a sexual assault.
Bihar Education Project Society Director Rahul Singh told The Pioneer that the BEP had advertised 510 posts of master karate trainers to attach at least one master trainer with each middle school associated with Kasturba Gandhi Vidyalaya. The BEP, however, finally short-listed only 240 applicants and several of them were male master Karate trainers only.
Now, the BEP has even relaxed the eligibility criteria for master karate trainers by dropping the condition that they should be at least Matriculate. The karate master trainers, however, should be black belt or red belt holders.
BEP has received nearly 400 applications against the second round of advertisement for filling up the remaining posts. BEP is hopeful of finding at least 250 suitable Karate trainers this time.
It is still doubtful how many of them will be girl karate trainers but it is certain that girls studying in the middle schools would definitely like to be trained by girl trainers in view of their socio-cultural background.
Altogether 531 out of total 534 blocks in Bihar have been declared as educationally backward blocks. Once these master girl trainers equip students with sufficient Karate skills, the trained middle school students will train their other colleagues in a well designed and structured format so that a large base of Karate trainers could be created without depending on the support from outside the state. Master trainers will provide Karate training of at least 120 hours to the girl students, studying in middle schools associated with Kasturba Vidyalaya.
The best trained 10 girl students will be selected from each middle school associated with Kasturba Vidyalaya with a purpose to provide them intensive training in karate so that they can take the responsibility of training their colleagues at the later stage.
In the first few months itself, a batch of 5100 girl karate trainers from the middle schools will be created. These trained karate trainers will also be awarded yellow, green and black belts, depending up on their individual competency in the marital art.
At least 28,000 girl students would be developed as karate trainers through intensive training by September next year. At least 12,000 girls are undergoing Karate training at various Government-run schools in the State presently.
Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has expressed his full confidence in the physical capability of women on several occasions and even went to the extent of reserving 35 percent seats for women in the recruitment of cops.
More than 15,000 women will be recruited in the State police force once the Chief Minister’s announcement is implemented. The Government has announced to appoint 43,671 police personnel during the next five years.
The CM said he did not find any reason why women police personnel could not be engaged in the operational duties also, exuding confidence in their physical strength. The Government’s growing faith in the capability of women could be understood when one considers that Bihar Military.