Every minute, 23 girls are married before they turn 18. That’s over 12 million girls every year. India is home to 223 million child brides — the world’s highest.
This National Sports Day, meet 66-year-old farmer Pandurang Terase, who uses sports to save girls from early marriage.
“I wanted to help girls by making sports accessible to them,” he says. In his remote village, sport was never considered a career, nor was any girl encouraged to pursue it.
Within a few years of taking up sports in 1979, Terase became a renowned national-level kabaddi player. He also started coaching fellow villagers. Since Terase came from a remote village, he knew the problem of child marriage and how poverty plays a significant role in it. Although it was a long shot, Terase knew sports could help lift people out of poverty and solve the problem of child marriage.
At first, he couldn’t even find 10 students, so he went house to house in the nearby villages, convincing students and parents. Today, four decades later, Terase has trained over 15,000 boys and girls from marginalized communities across hundreds of villages for free. Many have successfully overcome poverty and inspired more, all using sports.
When Pratiksha Sasulkar was just 16, her relatives began talking about getting her married.
“Because of abject poverty, many parents think once they get their daughter married, they become free of any responsibility. Daughters are just looked at as burdens, and they believe marrying will relieve them of bearing her education and daily expenses,” Terase explains.
Upon his suggestion, she started her kabaddi training. In just three years, she won more than 10 championships. She not only won medals but also started mentoring young girls. “Since this patriarchal society wants to restrict girls to household chores, they never let their daughters face the outside world and become independent,” Terase says.
But once Sasulkar began winning prize money, she became independent and started paying her own expenses, and her parents stopped pressuring her to marry. Sports and consistent training boosted her confidence and she started mentoring 50 girls aged 10 to 16, completed a postgraduate degree in business management, and supported her family. Now, Sasulkar is pursuing a course in physical education, and within a few years, she aims to become a certified coach.
Do read my story for Devex to know more about Terase’s inspiring work:
https://lnkd.in/despMywR
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