Bhopal: Stars in her eyes, this Bedia girl is eyeing IAS

Bhopal: Stars in her eyes, this Bedia girl is eyeing IAS

Jyoti comes from the Bedia community and is resident of small village in the Rajgarh district of the state.

Staff ReporterUpdated: Sunday, October 13, 2019, 08:48 PM IST
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BHOPAL: Jyoti Rathore, 21 an engineering graduate is aspiring to be an IAS Officer.

What is so great about it, one may ask. Jyoti comes from the Bedia community and is resident of small village in the Rajgarh district of the state.

She has just competed her BE (bachelor in engineering) topping in her college. Jyoti has been awarded a scholarship of the state government, under which she will receive free coaching for the UPSC Civil Services Examination for a period of one year in a well-known coaching centre at Delhi, along with living expenses of Rs 12,000 per month.

She is an Electronics and Communications engineer, and has passed out from the Bansal Institute of Science and Technology this year, topping in her college. She will be leaving for Delhi in the first week of November. “Bahut accha lag raha hai,” she told Free Press.

She hails from Salaiya, a small village in the Narsinghgarh Tehsil of Rajgarh district. Her community – Bedia – is traditionally into the profession of prostitution. “My father is no more and my mother does what women of my community have been doing since ages”, she says. Her Nani was also in the same profession, she says.

Salaiya only has a primary school. After primary education, at her insistence, her family got her admitted to a middle school at Narsinghgarh, from where she passed class eight.

That was in the year 2009. In the same year, she was spotted by Samvedna, an NGO that works among the Bedias.

Ramani Ranjan from Samvedna says that it was with great difficulty that they could persuade her family to allow them to shift Jyoti to Bhopal for further education. “They agreed only when we offered to make arrangements for the study of two of her brothers, too, at Bhopal,” he says.

At Bhopal, Jyoti got accommodation in a government hostel for SC/ST students at Professors Colony and was admitted to Government Vidya Vihar Higher Secondary School in the same locality.

After school, she opted for engineering. Her fee for the first semester was paid by Samvedna and thereafter, she won scholarships which funded her further education.

Jyoti’s dream is to become an IAS officer. “If I succeed, it will help change the mindset of my people. In my community, the trend is to either initiate girls into prostitution or marry them off,” she says.

When asked whether she faced any humiliating or snide remarks due to her social background, Jyoti replied in the negative. “In the village, everyone knows who you and so there is no question of any comments. And in Bhopal, no one cares to which community or caste you belong to,” she said.

In fact, according to her, whoever came to know of her background here only supported her.

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