Emergency! India’s children at grave risk!

In August 2006 a Reuters Alertnet poll classified india as the most dangerous country for children. Two months later the Human Development Report 2006 ranked India one of the world’s worst providers for children. Unsparingly State of the World’s Children 2007 fingers India as the worst performer for under-five mortality rates. Dilip Thakore reports 

The recently concluded year 2006 was marked by the publication of several well-documented studies by reputable international organisations highlighting the pathetic neglect of children’s education and welfare in developing countries of the third world — including fast-track, shining India — in agonizing detail. In August on the eve of the country’s 59th Independence Day celebrations marked by a spectacular avionics display of first strike capability of the Indian Air Force over the skies of New Delhi, came a Reuters Alertnet poll which classified India as the most dangerous country worldwide for children. Two months later the annual Human Development Report of UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) ranked India 126th in its international HDI (human development index), and one of the worst global performers in terms of nutrition, healthcare, water, sanitation and education provision for children. 

Moreover unsparingly, the annual State of the World’s Children 2007 (SWC 2007) report released on December 12 by the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) ranks India the 54th worst performer worldwide in terms of under-5 mortality rates (74 per 1,000 cf. 4/1,000 in Sweden) and indicates that almost half (47 percent) of booming India’s children below five years of age — the global workforce of the 21st century — is moderately to severely underweight with an equal percentage (i.e 58 million children) moderately to severely stunted. Although presumably for reasons of diplomacy and political correctness SWC 2007 refrains from identifying and editorially criticising the world’s most child-hostile nations, it predicts that the developing countries of the third world are unlikely to fulfill their obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) ratified by 192 countries (including India) or attain the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted by all member nations of the United Nations at the Millennium Summit in September 2000 (see box p.58).

However the statistical tables appended to SWC 2007 make it abundantly plain that in terms of the sheer number (if not percentage) of children deprived of essentials such as healthcare, education, formal identity and protection, or facing early marriage, and hazardous labour, India is the contemporary world’s worst offender.

According to Unicef’s previous year’s report (SWC 2006) if the MDGs are met within the next decade, 300 million additional hitherto excluded children worldwide will have access to improved sanitation by 2015, 100 million to improved water sources, 60 million to adequate nutrition, 115 million to primary education and the lives of 5.5 million children will be saved in the year 2015 alone. But the report laments that at current rates of progress towards attaining the MDGs, 170 million children worldwide will remain deprived of sanitation, 70 million of safe drinking water, 50 million of adequate nutrition, 80 million of primary education and 3.8 million under-fives will die in 2015. Although according to SWC 2006 these are global child deprivation projections, most children’s rights activists and monitors of the education scene in India describe them as gross under-estimates. The chances are that come 2015 the latter deprivation statistics will be the grim reality of India solo which hosts the world’s largest child (under 18 years of age) population estimated at 415 million.

Yet surprisingly contemporary India’s astonishing child deprivation statistics which stun foreign visitors fed on IIM, IIT and information technology industry success stories into disbelief, generate great indignation in the offices of EducationWorld, and would topple most OECD national governments, seem to hardly create a ripple in the placid calm of Lutyen’s New Delhi or disturb the ruffled sleep of India’s political leaders. One would have to scrutinise the manifestos of all parties which dominate national or state level politics very minutely to discover any degree of meaningful commitment or priority to children’s education, health or nutrition. Other than ritual references to the subject on occasions such as Children’s Day, Teachers Day, Girl Child’s Day, and HIV/AIDS Day etc, politicians across the ideological spectrum have little time to discuss ways and means to enrich India’s stagnant human resource pool. And curiously, the general public (and electorate) doesn’t seem to particularly care either.

Dr. Niranjan Aradhya, research associate at the Centre for Child and Law of the highly-rated Bangalore-based National Law School University of India, believes that the childhood of India’s 415 million children — especially of girl children — is “under severe threat” which could have catastrophic consequences upon their collective mindset after they attain maturity. “Neglect of human capital has been a conspicuous feature of post-independence India’s development effort. Over 40 years ago the National Education Commission (aka the Kothari Commission) warned that the future of India would depend upon investment made in education and recommended allocation of 6 percent of annual GDP towards education. But not once in the past half century has this allocation been budgeted by governments at the Centres or in the states. Moreover even though India is a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the four most important rights conferred upon children by the convention — the rights of survival, development, freedom from exploitation and participation in shaping their future — have been consistently denied to India’s children because of the failure of successive governments at the Centre and in the states to implement well-conceived plans and policies. Unfortunately neither in Indian politics nor society is there an awareness of the importance of putting children first and according top priority to provision of shelter, nutrition, drinking water, sanitation and education to them. If this situation is not urgently remedied, there is a real danger of India’s demographic dividend translating into a demographic disaster,” warns Aradhya. 

While useful wake-up calls to India’s political parties and society in general, such warnings are hardly new. Children’s rights organisations and certainly this publication, have sounded alarm bells and sirens on many an occasion while speaking up for the nation’s huge mass of neglected children. Yet such alarmist warnings don’t impact the stony conscience of the Indian establishment. Budgetary allocations for education remain stubbornly stuck in the 3-3.5 percent of GDP groove even as more than 200 million children are out of school, average teacher-pupil ratio in the nation’s classrooms has risen to a massive 1:60 and the overwhelming majority of India’s children are forced to attend dilapidated, ill-equipped schools without labs, libraries, drinking water and toilets.

In this obstinately stagnant scenario, standard explanations for the persistent neglect of India’s children are insufficient. A deeper investigation into the collective psyche of a professedly compassionate nation which paradoxically has consistently short-changed the most vulnerable members of society — women and children — is required.

Indeed there is an accumulating body of evidence which indicates that deep within its collective sub-conscious — perhaps as a consequence of the crude family planning propaganda of 1960-80 — contemporary India is a pervasively child-phobic society. On the one hand while a tiny urban elite undoubtedly pampers its children for whom nothing but the very best in terms of education, healthcare, housing and entertainment is good enough, the great majority of the population tends to regard children as a necessary nuisance and at best as insurance against the adversities of old age in a society in which social security or life insurance is rarity (only 10 percent of households are covered) and inflation is persistent. This is the only explanation why 21st century India has the world’s largest number of out-of-school children (over 200 million) and largest child labour force variously estimated at 60-120 million. It also explains why this country tolerates the world’s largest number of child prostitutes and largest number of child abuse incidents and accidents annually. Nor is there any dearth of evidence that the great majority of India’s unfortunate children are routinely denied adequate food, clothing and shelter, and education.

Dr. Shekhar Seshadri, professor of child psychiatry at Bangalore’s highly reputed National Institute of Mental Health & Neuro Sciences (est.1974) proffers an explanation. “In Indian society adult-child relationships are built around instruction, expectation and control. There’s conspicuous lack of a culture of discourse or recognition of the personhood of children; relentless pressure to perform is built into the parent-child relationship,” Seshadri told EducationWorld in a memorable July interview in which he pilloried India’s ambitious upwardly mobile new middle class for making their children’s lives a vale of tears (see cover story ‘Pushy parents driving kids over the edge’, EW August 2006).

But while there is general awareness within Indian society that the overwhelming majority of children — the nation’s future — are getting a raw deal, there is insufficient information about the depth and reach of the numerous deprivations which the country’s voiceless and vulnerable children suffer. With the media incrementally metamorphosing into a middle class entertainment medium and attention deficit disorder becoming a national problem, shrinking time and space is being devoted to children’s rights issues and welfare. Therefore in a departure from the norms of contemporary journalism, in this issue of EducationWorld a determined effort has been made to plumb the depths of the multiple deprivations which the children of India suffer on a daily basis.
 

Food. The recently released State of the World’s Children, 2007 makes a devastating indictment of the poor food and nutrition security provided by government and Indian society to children. According to the report, because of pervasive gender inequalities which deprive women of adequate nourishment, one-third (30 percent) of new-born Indian children are low birth weight; 1.9 million children under-five children die annually, and 47 percent of surviving children in this formative age group are moderately to severely underweight with 46 percent suffering severe to moderate stunting which could impact their cognitive processes.

Following sustained pressure from voluntary organisations and a small minority of child rights activists (including this publication), since 2004 the free mid-day meal scheme for government primary schools has been gradually expanded and according to Union finance minister P. Chidambaram, covers 120 million children countrywide. However it is pertinent to note that in Uttar Pradesh (pop.166 million) and Bihar (82 million) — India’s most backward states — the free mid-day meal provision is patchy at best.

Clothing. Publication of statistics indicating per capita cloth availability has been discontinued by government agencies in recent years. Nevertheless it’s a matter of common knowledge that comparatively Indians — particularly rural Indians — tend to be less well-clothed than the rest of the world. Every year an unknown but large number of citizens in the cold north and north-east regions of the country freeze to death unreported, and visuals of minimally clad Indians routinely broadcast on television channels seldom cause embarrassment in New Delhi or the state capitals. Inevitably vulnerable children are the worst sufferers.

Shelter/ housing. One of the worst kept secrets of post-independence India’s socio-economic development effort of the past half century is that the country’s already pitiful national housing stock has continuously depreciated. According to the Mumbai-based Housing Development Finance Corporation (HDFC) there is a national deficit of 24 million housing units in India currently. It is submitted this is a gross under-estimate because of definitional problems. The great majority of dwelling units countrywide which are classified as ‘houses’ are in fact dilapidated structures which would be condemned as dangerous property in western countries. An estimated 80 percent of dwelling units in contemporary India are single room structures; 60 percent are flimsy thatched roof dwellings and shockingly according to HDR 2006, only 33 percent of the population has sustainable access to improved sanitation. Moreover while only 10 percent of dwelling units countrywide enjoy the luxury of piped water, 30 million households don’t have sustainable access to improved water sources. In this scenario for children to have a room of their own for study, rest and recreation is a rare luxury.

Education. Despite general acknowledgement that universal elementary education is the foundation block of national development, primary education is the most neglected sector of post-independence India’s child-hostile economy. Of the 200 million children enrolled in primary education at the start of any given academic year, 53 percent, i.e over 100 million, drop out before they reach class VIII. And of the remainder barely 33 percent finish secondary school (class X) and half the remainder completes higher secondary education (class XII). Unsurprisingly India’s aggregate college or tertiary education cohort is a mere 11 million, of whom — thanks to Central and state government interference and micro-management of higher education — only 25 percent will be employable. Little wonder that the Indian economy substantially liberated from the shackles of the licence-permit-quota regime in 1991, is experiencing an unprecedented skills shortage.

This huge wastage of human resources perhaps unprecedented in world history, is the consequence of multiple policy and administrative failures compounded by lack of political and societal will to accord education prime importance on the list of national priorities. Thus not only has the annual allocation for education (Centre plus states) never aggregated 6 percent of GDP as recommended by the Kothari Commission in 1966, the meagre 3-3.5 average annual allocation has been misspent or worse. As a consequence one fifth of the 800,000 government primary schools countrywide don’t have proper, pucca buildings; another 20 percent are multigrade single teacher institutions; 25 percent don’t provide drinking water and over half are bereft of toilets. Little wonder over 100 million children drop out of these ill-equipped primary schools in which little learning takes place, before reaching class VIII. And the damning statistic that 25 percent, i.e over 1 million government school teachers are absent on any given day doesn’t help either.

“The schools which the over-whelming majority of India’s children attend require radical improvement. Moreover the quality of teachers in them also leaves a lot to be desired. While they are supposedly qualified for their jobs, the plain truth is that they are not motivated in any way and in most schools — especially government schools — there is no accountability either. Regrettably the average teacher is just not interested in her job. There is an urgent need to restore some prestige to the teaching profession so that people who really want to teach enter the profession,” says Dr. Shaheen Mistry an alumna of St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai and Manchester University (UK) and promoter-director of the Mumbai-based Akanksha, an NGO which utilises school and corporate premises to provide free night schooling to slum children.

Healthcare. Deprivation of meaningful education apart, the other great injustice that post-independence India’s children have stoically suffered — and continue to suffer — is deficient healthcare services. According to HDR 2007 India’s annual government outlay — Centre plus states — towards healthcare services is a mere 1.2 percent of GDP as against the 6.9 percent and 6.8 percent in Britain and the US. The report also discloses that the equivalent of 3.6 percent of GDP is spent privately on medical care by Indian households in a society in which 300 million people scratch out a living on less than $1 per day. Little wonder that in a country in which (because of poor quality water supply and lack of sanitation systems) diarrhoea is a major killer of children, a mere 22 percent of them receive oral rehydration and continued feeding.

Medical and healthcare services are particularly deficient in rural India where two-thirds of the country’s 1 billion citizens scratch out meagre lives and although government propaganda boasts of 23,109 PHCs (primary health centres) countrywide, it’s common knowledge that India’s PHCs are characterised by chronic absenteeism of paramedics, and paucity of life saving drugs and medicines which are routinely pilfered. Unsurprisingly racked by hunger and disease 46 percent of children under-five suffer moderate to severe stunting which could adversely affect their cognitive processes.

Child security. Until very recently the consensus of opinion among demographic and economic pundits was that a large child population was a drag on national economic development. But with the developed nations of the West and Japan experiencing falling birth and death rates which has resulted in the “greying of the West”, expert opinion has begun to discern the ‘demographic dividend’ that countries with young populations are likely to enjoy in the latter half of the 21st century. With 415 million children below the age of 18, contemporary India has the world’s largest child population. Yet given the scale of neglect and abuse of this potentially valuable human resource pool, doubts are being increasingly expressed whether India can reap the demographic dividend in the foreseeable future.

The multiple deprivations outlined above are compounded by a conspicuous lack of child security. SWC 2007 estimates that 14 percent of the country’s children aged five-14 — an estimate which translates into almost 50 million — are employed as child labour in the country’s farms, factories and sweatshops for pitiful, if any, wages. Domestic voluntary sector activists estimate the number of working children as much greater with some estimates as high as 120 million. Yet paid employment is the least of the dangers confronting the nation’s children. Over the two decades past, the practice of kidnapping of children for ransom and/ or for sale into prostitution and forced servitude has assumed industry proportions in a society in which law and order systems have collapsed across large swathes of the rural hinterland (see cover story ‘Is India dangerous for children. Very’ EW September 2006).

“Violation of children’s rights ranging from female infanticide, child labour, commercial sexual exploitation and other forms of abuse has reached crisis proportions in India. In particular, child trafficking is becoming a very serious issue. Notwithstanding the enactment of so-called child-friendly legislation, children are increasingly being employed in industry and domestic households, and experiencing growing commercialised sexual exploitation. In this scenario, the worst sufferers are children from poor and illiterate rural households, particularly children from scheduled castes, tribes and other backward classes. In Tamil Nadu over 12,000 village watchdog committees have been constituted to fortify village boundaries to prevent the abduction of children,” says S. Ananthalakshmi director of the Indian Council for Child Welfare, Chennai.

Although 21st century India’s politicians pre-occupied with caste-based electoral calculations and winning the next election, the media obsessed with page 3 celebrity journalism and a greedy new middle class absorbed in an orgy of conspicuous consumption don’t seem to be aware, India’s children, towards whom they should have the first duty of care, are at grave risk with the institutional infrastructure exhibiting too many broken windows (see book review p.72).

“In spite of super-power pretensions, India has the world’s largest number of children traumatized by crushing poverty and unchecked violation of their rights. Deprived of adequate food, shelter and clothing, they also have to suffer the poor quality education and healthcare services provided by state governments. Yet above all, the greatest deprivation is access to quality education which makes them vulnerable to every type of atrocity, exploitation, child labour and loss of childhood. No further time should be lost in raising the annual outlay for education to 6 percent of GDP and improving the status and service conditions of teachers while taking care to link higher pay with better education outcomes,” says T.K. Mathew the legendary founder secretary-general of the Delhi-based Deepalaya, an NGO which runs 337 education centres, four of which are established schools, for 40,000 underprivileged children in the national capital region and north India.

The voices of child rights researchers and educationists such as Mathew, Ananthalakshmi, Mistry and Aradhya quoted above are part of a chorus of protest which is rising to a crescendo. Quite clearly there is something fundamentally wrong — indeed rotten — with the priorities and collective mindset of a society which neglects vulnerable children who constitute the majority of its population.

Yet if 21st century India’s children are at great risk, the fault is not solely of politicians who in the final analysis mirror public opinion and priorities, but of leaders in all walks of life and sectors of the economy. Society as a whole must pay urgent attention to this national emergency with profound implications for India’s future in the emerging competitive global economy.

With Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai); Autar Nehru (Delhi) & Gaver Chatterjee (Mumbai)