The uphill journey of life begins with their name. Maafi. Faaltu. Manbhaari. Nakushi. Antimbala. India takes the naming of children seriously, and yet too many girls are being told they are a burden the moment they enter the world. This is the devastating truth that Safeena Husain introduces upfront in her book, Every Last Girl, a meticulous recording of her experience of trying to step in, gingerly at first, to rattle and shake up India’s deeply entrenched prejudice against the girl child.
“A girl Arrives (Aachuki). Unwanted (Nakushi). Her parents see her as Useless (Faaltu). They have a heavy heart (Manbhaari), they are Sorry (Maafi)… even Angry (Naraaz). They make a plea: Stop (Galla)! And they hope she is the Last Girl (Antimbala),” she writes.
These names reveal a thought process that has morphed into a state of being. The girls are held back, she notes, by a mindset that keeps them out of school, denies them an education and sets them on a narrow pathway that leads to marriage and motherhood. Childhood is nonexistent. It’s not the same for boys, who are heralded into the home and village with much fanfare, ladoos et al, quite unlike the silence that greets the arrival of a girl child.
When Husain launched her NGO, Educate Girls, in 2007, she began field work in Rajasthan where she encountered these names—a staggering 1,516 girls were called Dhaapu (fed up)—which reflected a story, and the place from where her work would have to begin. The book chronicles this journey.
In 2025, Husain’s NGO, Educate Girls, won the Magsaysay Award, and she is one of Time magazine’s 2026 Women of the Year, but her work is far from over. Her organisation’s focus is on out-of-school girls, those who have never been enrolled or have dropped out, to gently urge them back to school, which is easier said than done for a myriad reasons, the two most widespread being poverty and patriarchy. In poor households, boys too are forced to drop out of school in search of jobs, but that’s another story.
Husain begins her book by recounting the story of nine-year-old Vibha who proudly tells her she does go to school. But how, when her name isn’t in the school register? She understood soon enough what “going to school” meant—a ride to school on the back of her elder brother’s bike on occasion and then hanging around near the school, not in the classroom.
Vibha’s father—and many others too— was emphatic. He said he couldn’t afford to send Vibha and her sisters to school, and that that was the preserve of the boy child. The refrains she and her team heard sounded like a broken record: if the girls are sent to school, who will do the housework? Or, why should we educate girls who are meant to go away to another home when they grow up?
“It’s the boys who need the investment, the good food, good health and, of course, education,” she is told again and again. This apathy towards girls, points out Husain, manifests in a widespread neglect of girls’ health and well-being. That the government had to launch a scheme, Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao, in 2014 tells a story— there is an existential threat to girls.
Many girls still live on the margin of margins, the book reveals with real-life examples, lived experiences. Husain’s conclusions, articulated cogently in Every Last Girl, about the road ahead are manifold. A girl’s vulnerability is the highest when she is an out-of-school child, because she has the “least tools” to help her build resilience and get the opportunities to grow and blossom. With her mobility restricted, she is also “ripe for exploitation”.
Faced with such challenges, Husain learnt on the job how to overcome them and fulfill the goal of cajoling the family to send girls back to school, one Vibha at a time. Often, she provided real-life examples of girls whose lives had changed after being sent to school and how even a “little bit of education” can turn things around. Her team of gender champions would sometimes do extraordinary interventions like looking after a family’s goats when required so that a girl child could take her exams.
Educate Girls’ first duty is to go door to door and find out those who are “truly invisible to the system”—the girls who were born at home and, therefore, their births were not recorded. “Without a birth certificate, girls can easily ‘disappear’.” Girls who are child brides are also often overlooked. In 2024, India accounted for one in three of the world’s child brides, with an estimated 1.5 million girls getting married each year before the age of 18 with states like Rajasthan and West Bengal carrying a higher burden.
Educate Girls has spread its wings to four states and plans to reach seven more states in the next five years. With their task cut out, Husain feels that the key ingredient for mindset change is authentic storytelling—stories that show the real impact of education in people’s lives. Her book is an open call to support girls’ education so that they don’t miss out on life, its opportunities, and self-respect. It’s a tall ask in a country of embedded prejudice. The quest for the last girl (Antimbala) to educate continues.