The Ministry of Human Resource Development, Department of School Education and Literacy, presented the Digital Gender Atlas for Advancing Girls’ Education in India to the media in New Delhi on March 9, 2015. The tool, which has been developed with the support of UNICEF, will help identify low performing geographic pockets for girls, particularly from marginalised groups such as scheduled castes, schedule tribes and Muslim minorities, on specific gender related education indicators.
The Atlas is placed on the MHRD website and available and ready to use by States/Districts/Blocks education administrators or any other interested group. In order to plan and execute educational interventions, the purpose of the Gender Atlas is to help identify and ensure equitable education with a focus on vulnerable girls, including girls with disabilities. To ensure this is feasible, the Gender Atlas has been developed as a hands-on management tool to enable critical decisions and actions in pockets where gaps are to be met.
The Atlas provides comparative analysis of individual gender related indicators over three years and that enables a visual assessment of the change and an understanding of whether some intervention introduced in a geography at a particular point in time has worked or not. It is constructed on an open source platform with an inbuilt scope of updating data by authorized persons to retain its dynamic character.
Components of the Digital Gender Atlas
The main components of the Gender Atlas are : (i) Composite Gender Ranking (ii) Trend Analysis of Gender Indicators (iii) Vulnerabilities based on educational indicators in districts with substantial tribal, schedule caste, minority population in educationally backward blocks and in left wing extremist districts, and the low sex ratio districts seleced uner Beti Bachao Beti Padhao programme.
