She is studying in Scholars' public school in the Sixth standard and is knownas the "golden girl" in her school. She is also interested in singing,drawing and music. One after another, she acquired various skills. Horse ridingand roller skating became her favourite games. When children of her age groupwere playing with toys, she was busy honing her skills in adventuresports.
Shreshtha was just another seven-year-old, interested in gorging ice-creams and playing, till she discovered that the daughter of the "jhadu-poccha" bai at her residence was about to get married. What came as a shock to Shrestha was the fact that the would-be bride was of her age. "I don't know how but I managed to persuade the Bai to postpone the marriage," says Shreshtha. This wastwo years back. Shreshtha soon realised that marriage at a tender age was not the only problem confronting girls like her.
Steeped in a feudal socio-economic set-up, the Chambal region is known not only for being MP's dacoit country but also for rampant female infanticide and foeticide. Though no statistics are available to show how many girls are killed by slipping tobacco into their little mouths immediately after they step into this world, the dismal sex ratio (822) of Morena does show that the practice is not rare by any means. And the register of the district government hospital at Morena testifies that 95 per cent of the admissions to the Children's ward are of boys. Girls, apparently, do not even deserve treatment.
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Shreshtha decided to use her prowess in roller skating, which she had learned when in ClassIII, to launch a campaign opposing discrimination against the girl child. "Don't kill your girls. Send your daughters to school.May be, one of them will become Kalpana Chawla or Sania Mirza or Kiran Bedi . If not that, she can at least become like me," she tells the crowd that gathers to see the little girl travelling on roller skates.
Shreshtha has, so far, skated for over 250 kms (by now, at a young age of 9, shehas won 95 national level -- of which 70 are gold -- medals) on pot-holed roads to spread her message. On her 115 kms. trip from Morena to Bhind, she stopped at over one hundred villages. There were 20 stopovers in the Morena-Agra yatra. She is now planning a 200 kms. odyssey from Sabalgarh to Bhind. A local social service organisation called "Sanjivani" takes care of the pre-publicity for her skating journeys. So far, over 20 thousand handbills have been distributed by Shreshtha and her team appealing to parents to let their daughters live and study. "I will be happy if our daughter's effort save even one girl child peryatra", say Shreshtha's parents.
