Here’s a question worth sitting with: have you ever noticed an obstacle on the road you take every day — and instead of removing it, you just… started taking a different road?
Most of us do this constantly. It’s the easier option.
Two of our supplementary teachers in Nana Umarda village, in Gadhda taluka of Botad district, refused to take the easier option — and what came out of that refusal is a small but powerful idea every school should hear about: a “Kanya Raksha Dal,” a girls’ protection squad.
It started with a puzzle that was quietly getting worse. The village school had a shortage of teachers to begin with, and our two supplementary teachers stepped in to close that gap. But they noticed something troubling as the months went by: the number of girls in class was shrinking. Slowly, steadily, fewer and fewer girls were showing up.
They went to the parents. Conversations, visits, questions — and nothing conclusive came of it. No one would say plainly why the girls were disappearing from the classroom.
So the teachers changed their approach entirely. Instead of asking why the girls weren’t coming to school, they started meeting the girls where they already were — going out to play with them, every day, bringing toys and games along. Slowly, real friendships formed. The girls looked forward to these visits. And eventually, the teachers gently redirected that daily playtime toward the school itself, trimming the outside games bit by bit until school became the new meeting point.
It worked. But the deeper problem hadn’t gone anywhere — and the truth, when it surfaced, went well beyond bad attendance. In conversations with the community, it became clear that safety was at the root of it. Parents were afraid to send their daughters to and from school.
That’s when the fight truly began. One of our teachers, Divyarajsinh, had already completed NCC training. When the school’s own principal, Shri Rajdipsinh Gohil — who had left a career in the police force to become a headmaster — heard about the idea, he backed it immediately. Together, they started training the girls to defend themselves, and gave the initiative a name: Kanya Raksha Dal.
Today, in that same school, the number of girl students has overtaken the number of boys — a complete reversal of where things stood before. It’s the kind of turnaround that doesn’t happen because of a policy memo. It happens because two teachers refused to shrug and change their route, and chose to clear the obstacle instead.
So — does your school have something like this? Maybe it should.
