Thinking Allowed: For our children

First a hurrah for the two child rights activists — one of them a child herself — for winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Then a second hurrah to our first homegrown winner of the Nobel Peace Prize — he may not have the stature of his predecessor, Mother Teresa, the first Indian awardee, but he is an Indian by birth. India’s Kailash Satyarthi and Pakistan’s Malala Yousafzai were honoured today “for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.”

Lovely. But then the Nobel Committee seems to get carried away by the symbolism. “The Nobel Committee regards it as an important point for a Hindu and a Muslim, an Indian and a Pakistani, to join in a common struggle for education and against extremism.” (Also, more fundamentally, a man and a woman, an adult and a child, if we are to go down that nice, condescending, avuncular path of bringing opposites together.) But are Mr Satyarthi and Ms Yousafzai really fighting a common battle against extremism, and for education?

Not really. Malala Yousafzai is. The brave and articulate 17-year-old’s struggle is against terrorism and for education. But Mr Satyarthi’s fight has a wider arc — the protection of childhood, with all its rights and entitlements. His Bachpan Bachao Andolan has been involved in not only the rescue and rehabilitation of children from child labour, but also in changing policy and creating child-friendly villages.

But the two do represent a common cause — that of child rights. And at a time when India and Pakistan are again at loggerheads, the idea of encouraging “fraternity between nations” and the concept of a lasting peace based more on ironing out inequalities than on territorial violence is very welcome.

And since awards are about symbolism, this Peace Prize should act as a final wake-up call for India as it continues to ignore the rights of its children. Much has happened over the last two decades, the situation of children has improved. Infant and child mortality rates have come down. Female infanticide and foeticide have declined. There has been a significant reduction in child labour. More children are going to school. And there have been efforts to protect the rights of children through setting up bodies like the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) and laws like the Right To Education (RTE). Given India’s enormous strides in other fields, these achievements seem embarrassingly small. And the reason is a clear lack of political will.

Let’s admit it: children do not figure in our idea of India. When we think of the Indian citizen, we do not think of our children. When we think of citizens’ rights and privileges, entitlements and constitutional guarantees, children do not spring to mind. Children belong to our personal world, where we may mollycoddle them or use them to supplement the family’s income, depending on our own station in life. Children are more like our property.

Not surprisingly, our national and state budgets reflect our indifference towards children. Expenditure on education hovers around barely three per cent of the GDP, among the lowest in the world. About one third of India’s children are malnourished — one in every five malnourished child in the world is in India. Even children from Sub-Saharan Africa have better health and nutrition than ours. But do we see a substantial rise in allocation of resources for children, for their protection, healthcare, mid-day meals or Integrated Child Development Schemes (ICDS)? No.

Besides, there is a huge gap between policy, budgeting and proper implementation. For example, the mid-day meal scheme, covering 12 crore schools and costing about Rs 10,000 crore a year, has been a blessing for millions of underprivileged children. But almost every week, we hear of tragic cases of food poisoning, of illness and often deaths from badly implemented meal schemes.

And it is a crying shame that Indian children are still dying of preventable ailments like measles and diarrhoea. That every summer children in Uttar Pradesh die of a mysterious brain fever sometimes called Japanese Encephalitis. That routinely scores of children die in government hospitals like in West Bengal’s Malda. That millions of children live on the streets and are regularly subjected to physical and sexual violence.

Despite its good intentions, the NCPCR — or the state commissions — can do very little to prevent such violence or get justice for it. They are toothless, and under the thumb of the government, which politicises child protection. The children’s homes are another horror story. A majority of these “homes” are where children are abused and violated in every way. In an unequal and largely unethical society warped by poverty and violence, the place for society’s most powerless and marginalised is not a happy place.

For child rights is about power. It is not just about freeing kids from bonded labour and carpet-making units and sweatshops. Or keeping children under 14 out of hazardous industries. It is also not about putting them in school — though that helps. Recognising child rights is about changing our attitude towards children, recognising children as individuals with a mind of their own and the rights and privileges and dignity of any other citizen of India.

It is about wider power equations. In a deeply stratified society, where power is controlled mostly by the accident of birth via caste, class, religion and gender identities, children are further disempowered. There is need for awareness of child rights. There is need for national policies consciously structured as child-friendly. There is need to further the cause of child rights by targeting the underlying inequalities that rob the powerless of their citizens’ rights. There is a need to identify and get rid of the root causes of deprivation that disempower our children.

South Asia is largely a feudal society where tradition runs deep and the powerful have unchallenged control over the powerless. Where millions of children — especially girls — are deprived of basic necessities and entitlements, are abused, exploited, violated and neglected. Hopefully, by putting the spotlight on child rights in South Asia, this shared Nobel Peace Prize will help India and Pakistan sort out our attitude towards our children, and urgently rectify our dismal record of child rights.

The writer is editor of The Little Magazine. She can be contacted at: sen@littlemag.com