Parents’ attitude towards girls’ education: A case study of tea tribes of Borbam Tea Estate

Woman, an equally important part of human society, constitutes almost half of total population of the country. However, this section of human society is being deprived in many socio-economic aspects as reflected in many multidimensional indices including GDI. Among them education is one important aspect. Participation of women in education seems to be less than that of their counterpart males which is reflected in the male-female difference in literacy rate, school dropout, Gender Parity Index (GPI) etc. of the country. Besides socio-economic factors captured in Socio-Economic Status (SES), parents’ attitude biased against girls’ education is an important determinant for this difference. This low level participation in education is chief factor for more and more deprivation of this section. This paper is an attempt to understand the attitude of Tea Tribe of Borbam Tea Estate towards girls’ education. These people are based in rural areas, on old customs, and survive in poor economic conditions. Educational awareness among these people has not spread much for which they prefer work for their child to school. This paper is based on a sampling of 50 households of Tea Tribe of Borbam Tea Estate of Sivsagar District of Assam. An attitude test questionnaire is prepared for this purpose. A modified 3 points Likert scale is used to test the attitude of parents to their girl's education. Care is taken to ensure required reliability and validity of the questionnaire.