While boys in the Rann of Kutch region in northwest India study and play in their villages, young girls are sent to work helping their parents in the unforgiving cracked seabed in the dry season, writes MARY JORDAN
IN THE soft light of dawn, the cracked, dry seabed stretched endlessly in every direction.
Jyotsna Patadia was alone - she is often alone - in her family's grass hut, a speck of life in the emptiness, cooking potatoes and onions over an open fire.
From October to May, Jyotsna (15) works here in the desolate salt pans of western India, where her parents earn a living coaxing salt from the ground. The family arrives when the summer monsoons end and the water recedes from this vast plain.
Her two younger brothers stay behind in their village, Kharaghoda, a chaotic mix of camels and water buffalo, schools and vegetable sellers, newborn babies and blind old men.
Though the village of 12,000 is a seven-hour walk from Jyotsna's isolated hut on the salt pans, it might as well be England, it feels so different and far away.
"It's easier to be a boy," said Jyotsna, who was forced to drop out of school at 10 to help her parents. "They get to go to school."
Jyotsna's mother said she could not afford to let all three of her children study, so she picked her daughter to work. It is a familiar story in much of the developing world, and particularly south Asia. In India, half the women older than 15 are illiterate, twice the rate for men, and millions of poor girls are pulled out of school to help at home, often when they are 10 to 12 years old.
"I regret she has this hard life," said her mother, Ranjanben Patadia (35). "But this is the destiny of girls. It was my destiny, too."
Unlike her mother, who never set foot in a classroom, Jyotsna did study on and off for a few years, thanks to a major government effort over the past decade to enrol all children. Though Jyotsna can still barely read or write, that progress has made her more aware of what she is now missing.
Human rights advocates say millions of teenage girls like Jyotsna are less resigned than their mothers were to the age-old preference in India for sons.
"Boys have more options," Jyotsna said one recent day as she tidied the one-room hut where she spends most of her time. She is told she is too old to play running games, yet notes that boys her age can.
Boys freely come and go, she said, but once girls reach puberty they are kept close to home, another reason that the start of a girl's menstrual period often means the end of her schooling.
"I would like to learn more," said Jyotsna, whose name means moonlight.
She said people gossip that older girls who go to school "are too outgoing". But if she had more education, she said excitedly, "I would talk in front of 50, even 100 people!"
To this day, in some parts of India, fewer than eight girls are born for every 10 boys, because parents abort female foetuses, a legacy of a centuries-old mind-set that values boys more. Sons carry the family name, inherit land and become the main breadwinners.
In this patriarchal society, fathers and brothers are widely seen as the decision-makers, many even telling wives and sisters what to cook and when to leave the house. Especially in rural India, girls are far likelier to die before the age of five, because scarce food and medicine are given first to their brothers.
"The constitution says, yes, women are equal, but society says, no, they are not," says Veena Padia, programme director in India for the international aid group CARE. "We really feel angry and frustrated, at times even disgusted," at the bias against women, she said. "Mind-sets take a long time to change."
Padia says that middle- and upper-class women have made significant advances and that it is poor and marginalised women who suffer the greatest discrimination.
There are so many girls like Jyotsna in the salt pans, working while their brothers study, that CARE is supporting Ganatar, a local group that digs pits and covers them with burlap roofs to serve as makeshift classrooms. The hope is that parents might send their daughters to school if it were closer.
When girls marry, as Jyotsna is expected to soon, they move in with their in-laws. Many view it as a bad investment to spend scarce cash on pencils and notebooks for a daughter who will work most of her life for her husband's family.
"They call it 'watering somebody else's garden'," said Susan Durston, an education adviser with Unicef.
Long-standing social customs and beliefs bar girls from school in many parts of south Asia.
In Bangladesh, "Eve-teasing" - bullying and sexual harassment - hounds girls from class. In Afghanistan last month, Muslim extremists threw acid in the faces of girls walking to school as a warning to stay home.
Zealots in northwestern Pakistan recently torched 150 schools for girls.
Usually, though, a quieter discrimination steals a girl's chance to learn. Every day, parents decide, for instance, to buy a bicycle so their son can get to school but refuse to spend money on a book for their daughter.
Jyotsna's brother Bharat (13) bounced out of bed in a house that has everything Jyotsna's hut does not: electricity, a television, plenty of water, cousins dropping by.
After filling up on steaming tea and warm millet bread his grandmother served him, Bharat dressed in a spotless blue-checked shirt and blue pants and ran out the door into a dirt street filled with rickshaws and a buzz of laughter and life.
It was 7am and time to go to the Kharaghoda public school, just across the road.
When the bell rang in the courtyard, Bharat and others lined up to sing the national anthem. One boy beat a drum, two others clashed cymbals.
Hands at their sides, the students stood in front of a picture of Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of knowledge. There were 60 boys and 30 girls.
A 10-year-old girl named Hiral straggled in late, holding the hands of her brother and sister, ages three and five. They would sit beside her all day in class, a practice teachers allow to encourage girls to come to school even when their parents make them babysit.
Bharat had no such distractions.
At 8am sharp, with his thick black hair combed neatly and his eyes bright and eager, he sat near the window in Classroom 4 reading about how India won its independence in 1947.
His room, in a century-old building that was once a jail, ached for paint. It is not that anyone here has much, human rights advocates say, but rather that what little there is so often goes to boys.
In Bharat's class there were 21 boys and nine girls. The male teacher - many elementary school teachers in India are male - spoke near a poster with pictures of 24 Indian leaders. With the exception of Indira Gandhi, all were men.
The teacher, Surendra Zala, lectured about British colonial rule.
Speaking in the local Gujarati language, he told his students it was important to learn English, "because you need it to be connected to the world and the internet."
Bharat listened intently, neatly jotting down notes. His cotton book bag bulged with 29 workbooks and notepads. History is his favourite subject, and Mahatma Gandhi is his hero because he "won independence peacefully," he said later.
Clack. Clack. Clack. The "machine", as everyone calls their water pump, sounds like a heartbeat. And in a way, it is. If it stops, so does life here. No more salt, money, meals.
Jyotsna's parents earn $500 annually from mining salt, and that all depends on the rickety old pump sucking briny underground water to the surface.
Once there, the water is channelled into hand-dug ponds.The sun bakes it, and the salt crystals left behind are sold to flavour potato crisps and scrambled eggs in distant lands.
One of Jyotsna's chores is to make sure that the machine, just outside the family's hut, keeps clackity-clacking. Sometimes it overheats or the fan belt breaks. Jyotsna then signals for help by holding a mirror up to the sun, creating flashes of light, and her parents come running.
At six one recent morning, Jyotsna had her breakfast: a cup of black tea. Milk doesn't exist in this place with no refrigeration. She brushed her brilliant white teeth with a toothbrush she keeps in a cranny in the dried-grass wall. There is no sink, no toilet.
Her parents had left before sunrise. They earn 35 cents for every 220-pound bag they fill with salt, so they start early and work late.
Dressed in a saffron-coloured salwar-kameez, her bead necklace held together with a safety pin, Jyotsna folded the covers on her parents' cots. She sleeps on a thin bed of blankets in the dirt.
As daylight broke, she swept. The nights wind, as always,had blown back the caked mud she brushed away the day before.
Her tiny 4ft 10in frame bent at the waist, she tidied her patch of the plain, again.
By mid-morning she had warmed the previous night's lentils, bread and other leftovers and carried them to her parents for breakfast, a water jug balanced on her head.
Her parents struggle in the heat, and her father, Bhopabhai Patadia (39), sometimes collapses.
He has high blood pressure, as do many here, because too much salt seeps into his body through cracks in his bare feet.
"I have the same problem," Jyotsna's mother says. "But I don't take medicine. We can't afford medicine for everyone."
In the evening sometimes, her husband smokes a bidi, a cheaper version of a cigarette. It's an indulgence, his wife explains, that "is only for men".
Jyotsna's father handed his daughter his empty water cup with a kind nod but not a single word. Then he and his wife began another shift in the unrelenting sun.
"No, it's not fair" that young boys study and girls work, he would say later. "But what can we do?"
Back at the hut, after washing the dishes, Jyotsna put chillies on a stone and ground them into a red paste, an hour's work, the start of another meal.
As the sun burned in the afternoon sky and turned these barren plains into a flat oven the size of Rhode Island, Jyotsna clung to the shade around her hut, sweeping, cooking and washing.
As she pulled a few more onions from a burlap sack, she said she daydreams of cooking like a chef she once saw on TV: "I dream I can buy the ingredients and know how to write down the recipes."
She said she could copy words from a blackboard but is unable to write down words she hears spoken.
"My brothers, they will study. They can hope for different things," she said. "What can I be?" - ( LA Times-Washington Postservice)