Children remain oppressed in golden jubilee year of Independence

As the country prepares to launch the golden jubilee celebrations of Independence with much fanfare and glitter, the victims of another oppression know no freedom to this day and their tears go unnoticed as they struggle for survival.

For the children of India, the 50th year of Independence ushers in an era marking a phenomenal growth in child labour, children on the streets, and those incarcerated in institutions. Of the estimated 290 million child population in the country, 108 million live in varying degrees of destitution -- 90.5 million of them in villages and 17.4 million in the urban areas.

In the area of health, the biggest challenge facing the country is to meet the health needs of the 0 to 6 age group which comprises 21 per cent of the total population, says a report on The State of the Child in India: An Overview in the 50th Year of Independence by the Centre of Concern for Child Labour.

Observing that health care for rural children is pitiable in the states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Orissa, and Gujarat, the report says about 12,000 toddlers go blind every year, one out of four, due to vitamin A deficiency and about 2.5 million children are threatened by blindness.

Some 60 per cent of children in the 0 to 6 age group suffer from nutritional anaemia and protein calorie malnutrition in one form or the other. Almost 40 per cent of all deaths in the country occur in this age group, a majority to vitamin A deficiency and anaemia. Only one out of every 10 children is lucky to receive food that conforms to international nutritional standards, the report says, quoting figures published by the National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau.

Observing that India has the largest number in child labour, it says the figure ranges from 23 million as stated by the government to 44 million as per unofficial estimates. The many manifestations of child labour are broken into seven main categories -- domestic service, forced and bonded labour, commercial sexual exploitation, industrial and plantation work, street work, work for the family, and girls' work.

The report calls for multiple strategies to tackle this issue. These strategies must aim to release children immediately from the most damaging situation such as bonded labour and child prostitution, rehabilitation of those children who are released from work through provision of adequate services and facilities, especially education, and protect working children who cannot immediately be released. Most importantly, the strategies should ensure that a new generation of children are not driven into most hazardous forms of work.

A significant development in the last two years, says the report, is that many developed countries have placed the issue of child labour under their foreign policy and, for the first time, political parties in the last general election included children's rights in their party manifestoes.

According to the 1993 UNDP human development report, India probably has the greatest number of street children with around 100,000 each in New Delhi, Bombay, and Calcutta and 45,000 in Bangalore. In order to survive, they must collect rags, shine shoes, sell newspapers, and scavenge in rubbish heaps. Many also turn to crime raising India's juvenile crime rate to 3.2 per 1,000 people, the report points out.

The number of children pushed into begging has been estimated by census figures as about 151,000 -- 120,000 in rural areas and over 30,000 in towns. Of those listed, West Bengal has 25 per cent of the national total followed by Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Orissa. Police records indicate that in many cases, parents themselves use their children for begging. Other children may be victims of cruel exploitation in beggar colonies, where kidnapped children are maimed and mutilated and forced to beg.

In the area of education, it is pointed out that despite provisions within the Constitution to provide free and compulsory education to each child till the age of 14, this has not been realised so far. Out of a total of 575,926 villages in the country, an estimated 48, 566 are not served by any school at all.

Approximately 4.5 million children are being offered any kind of pre-primary programme, forming barely five per cent of the population in the 3 to 6 age group. Though on the positive side, over 80 per cent of six year olds are enrolled in school and that of girls increased by 20 per cent between 1986 and 1993, on the other side of the coin, about 35 per cent dropped out before completing primary school and 15 to 20 per cent did not attend school regularly.

About 32 million of the 105 million children aged 6 to10 were out of school in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal. Barring states like Kerala and Tamil Nadu, reaching full enrollment of the age group 6-10 remains a major challenge in all the states, says the report.

Pointing out that India will have the largest number of illiterates in the world by the turn of the century, it says the challenge before the country was to accommodate all children in the 6 to 10 group in primary schools by 2007 (the final year of the Tenth Plan). For this, 1.3 million classrooms would be required and 740,000 new teachers at a cost of Rs 400 billion, it adds.

On the positive side, there is growing concern for the welfare of the girl child. Despite incidents of female infanticide and foeticide, there has been a narrowing of gap between female and male mortality rates in the early 1990s.

The National Plan of Action for the Girl Child for 1991 to 2000 recognises the rights of the girl to equal opportunity, to be free from hunger, illiteracy, ignorance and exploitation. Stating that these elements are covered in India's ancient culture when we pay tribute to Laksmi, Saraswati and Annapoorna, the report calls for efforts to revive positive cultural factors which may promote the girl child's rights.

UNI