Hard Facts – Heartening Moves

For the Underprivileged Child in India

POVERTY & SURVIVAL – 60 million under-6 children live in poverty in India and are in dire need of care. 1.8 million children die every year before reaching their first birthday.

• The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) of 2005 being currently implemented in 200 districts, will give employment to the rural poor and create the much needed public infrastructure. Mobile Creches is lobbying for crèches and adequate budgetary allocations for them, at the work sites, to ensure that children are cared for and women avail of this opportunity.

GENDER – 1 out of every 4 girls born in India does not survive her 15th birthday. Under-6 sex ratio stands at an all time low of 927 girls/1000 boys. The ratio in Delhi, the capital city, is at an alarming 827.

• Pre-Natal Diagnostics Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) (PNDT) Act was passed in 1994 and notified as late as January 1997. The blatant usage and spread of these diagnostic techniques for detecting and aborting the female foetus, continued unabated. The new Act, called the Pre-Conception and the Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act, 2003, fills some gaps in the old legislation. The first conviction under this Act came in early 2006.

NUTRITION – 1 in 3 babies are born with low birth weight (below 2.5 Kg) and 1 out of 3 of the world’s malnourished children lives in India.

• The Supreme Court, in response to a Public Interest Litigation under the aegis of the Right To Food Campaign, has ordered that 9 schemes which protect the Right to Life and Right to Food be implemented. The Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) Scheme has come under the scanner.

EDUCATION – 1 out of 2 children (5-14 year-olds) are out of school; 1 out of 3 who join, drop out before completing 5 years of primary school; India has the largest number of working children in the world

• The reconstituted Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) has recreated a platform for consultation on the education policy. The agenda for the movement gathering force is to demand replacement of all parallel schooling with regular full-time schools, a 10-year transition to a Common School System, inclusion of the under-6s in the Fundamental Right to Education, allocation of 6% of GDP for education and devolving all responsibility for education to the Panchayati Raj Institutions.

MATERNITY & WORK -.140 million women work in the informal sector - with no security of wages, no access to welfare, long hours of work in a place far from home and no maternity support. For 100,000 live births, 540 women die in/after childbirth every year; half the deliveries are in the absence of a trained attendant

• The Rural Health Mission with an accredited health worker, the Supreme Court order on ICDS (above) impacting the most marginalised women and children, the opportunity presented by the construction boom under the Construction Workers Act 1996 and the passing of NREGA (above) are all signs of progress. The Right to Information Act and the Public Interest Litigation (PIL) are powerful weapons in the hands of Civil Society that must be used to ensure implementation on these fronts.

Data Sources:
Census of India 2001
Human Development Report 2005
UNICEF State of the World’s Children Report, 2006