BANGALORE:
Call it woman power! Karnataka’s college-going girls have just broken the metaphorical glass ceiling and sent the boys packing in campuses across the state.
Girls outscoring boys in exams is passe. Karnataka’s 295 state-funded private degree colleges now have more girls than boys on campus. For the first time this decade, female enrolment has overshot that of the male category in the state. Fresh data put out by the department of collegiate education (2010-11) shows that there are 1,02,629 girls compared to 96,543 boys in private aided colleges.
Karnataka’s government colleges, too, have recorded a three-fold rise in enrolment of girls in the last 10 years. In 2001, there were 24,477 girls joining conventional government degree colleges. By 2010, their numbers have swelled to 81,161, growing at a much faster pace than the opposite sex. During the same period, the number of male students increased from 33,922 to 84,475.
“This is a remarkable success story of girls in Karnataka. Although girls have been consistently doing better than boys in II PU exams, access has been a big issue. The state government has not only doubled the number of colleges in the last 10 years but decided to make admission into government colleges free for girls, a couple of years ago,” collegiate education director K V Kodandaramaiah, told TOI.
Collegiate department officials say that arts courses have been the overwhelming choice of girls followed by commerce and sciences. Vasanthi Srinivasan, professor of organisational behaviour and human resources management at Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore (IIM-B) foresaw the trend. “This was expected. We have been seeing girls making informed choices when it comes to non-engineering programmes. The world over, women’s enrolment has been high in humanities and biological sciences. What we should do now is crack it to get more girls into pure sciences.”
The turning point, if you can call it so, in the gender story, came in 2007-2008. The JD(S)-BJP government nearly doubled the number of government colleges from 182 to 349, pushing up enrolments. The following year, enrolment of women was double that of male students.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / By Mathang Seshagiri / TNN / June 03rd, 2011