The fourth kilometre
“They were not being unfair to me. They were being careful about me.”
ILLUSTRATIVE STORY — not a real person. Replace with a real account, published only with written permission.
The nearest secondary school to the Wagholi centre is four kilometres away along a road with no footpath.
Families who will let a fourteen-year-old boy walk it will not let a fourteen-year-old girl, and they are not wrong to worry. The result is that girls in this catchment stop at Class 8 far more often than boys do, for a reason that has nothing to do with school fees, ability or interest.
A student bus pass costs about nineteen hundred rupees a year. Between 2019 and 2025 the share of girls in our group still enrolled at Class 9 went from about half to about four in five. The passes did most of that.