Selfies with daughters

There is a buzz in social media throughout the country with proud fathers and daughters busily clicking photographs together and uploading these for circulation. This has come in response to Prime Minister rendra Modi’s latest weekly radio talk where he called upon the people to join the ‘Selfie With Daughter’ initiative started by a Harya village. In a state with abysmal sex ratio due to adverse conditions for the girl child, the panchayat of Harya’s Bibipur village recently announced a competition for the best selfie clicked with daughters. The initiative seems to have touched a chord with Netizens but it has to translate into a socio-cultural movement on the ground to make a long-term success of the ‘Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao’ initiative by the Central government. Overall, 918 girls are presently born in the country vis-a-vis 1000 boys, an alarming situation. But at Panipat in Harya it is much worse, with the sex ratio there standing at 837 girls for 1000 boys. This prompted the Prime Minister to launch two schemes from Panipat in January this year, to encourage birth and education of girls as well as help them open bank accounts with higher rates of interest and income tax benefits. Prime Minister Modi had then spoken of a distorted society in which lesser numbers of women are born because they are killed off at birth and discrimited thereafter if they survive. The idea for backing the girl child has been around for quite some time, so it must move on to a higher phase of enlightened mass participation. Clicking selfies with daughters is a cute, heart-warming gesture towards this end.