There is a dangerous sickness of selfishness and indifference, if not hostility, towards children spreading far and wide within Indian society. Two glaring examples of callous cruelty towards youngest citizens highlight this malaise which is becoming endemic in this benighted republic, whose leaders are given to making loud proclamations about India’s inevitable emergence as a global super-power.

In August, the promoter-principal of a budget private school in Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh, annoyed that a child of the minority Muslim community had not completed his homework, directed all classmates to slap him, even as she openly threw communal slurs at the seven-year-old child. More recently, not one citizen came to the aid of a 15-year-old girl child who was found half naked, bleeding in the streets of the holy city of Ujjain after she had been brutally raped by a pervert, until she fell down unconscious. The first incident is indicative of the degree to which anti-minorities hate, fanned by vote-bank politicians, has permeated the teachers’ community, once the noblest and most honourable profession.

The second atrocity which prompted a lead edit in the Times of India (September 29) which seldom editorializes on such quotidian matters, is a measure of the erosion of values of compassion and empathy within the self-centred, materialistic middle class, for the multiplying poor and disadvantaged.

The daily atrocities visited upon youngest children at the micro-level countrywide — employment of child labour, widespread under-reported child trafficking and child porn, substance abuse and the burden of competitive exams — apart, our voiceless children suffer pervasive institutional and policy neglect. The majority of the country’s 1.10 million state government primary schools avoided like the plague by middle class households, are notorious for crumbling buildings, lack of drinking water and toilets, multi-grade classrooms (because 1.25 million government school teachers are absent every day) and rock-bottom learning outcomes.

Despite this, the annual outlay for education (Centre plus states) has averaged 3 percent of GDP since independence against the global average of 5 percent, and 7-10 percent in advanced OECD countries. Even of this meagre outlay, 40 percent is expended on heavy subsidisation of higher (mainly middle class) education. Moreover since the child-friendly EducationWorld was launched 23 years ago, none of the education ministers at the Centre or in the states has consented to grant interviews for intelligent questions about education policy and related matters. Ditto representative organisations of Indian industry (FICCI, CII, Assocham).

From public platforms, ignorant and ill-educated leaders proclaim their intent to harvest the country’s demographic dividend. But the grassroots reality is that India’s human resource is being shamefully neglected and under-developed. The consequences will be severe.