| Blossoms
in the dust
Deccan Herald
Bangalore On Children's Day, it would be wise to stop and reflect on the millions of flowers who are just waiting for a chance to bloom. To remember the kids who are toiling away, only to make up for the lapses of a society they were unlucky enough to be born into, points out SAKUNTALA NARASIMHAN. A CAR with a red light on top and three Important Looking People sitting inside (two in safari suits, one in a Gandhi cap, obviously an MLA) stops at a petrol bunk in the heart of the city. Working at the air pressure checking corner is an urchin looking about 12 or 13. A few metres ahead, the boy who comes up selling magazines at the traffic lights is even younger - 10 or 11, perhaps. The Important Looking Persons ignore him. Further on, at the wayside eatery, one small, emaciated urchin is wiping the tables while another is mopping the floor. Along the posh M G Road lined with swank shopping facades, two ragpickers rummage in the bin outside an ice cream parlour, looking for empty plastic tubs to lick. Yuppies in air conditioned Contessas drive past, heading for the movie theatre where they will pay Rs.40 per seat, enough to buy a bellyful of food for four such urchins. Enough to buy four picture book alphabet primers for kids who would rather learn to read than toil as cleaners in a cafe or sit in a cobbler`s kiosk by the roadside. We had a court order last year, 'banning` child labour. Ministers, law makers and civil servants whose cars pass by, can see that school age children still work, right in the heart of the metropolis, fetching and doing errands. No one cares. The law can ban, but cannot feed. And these children work because they have no alternative. They would starve if they did not work. Like Kedar, 12, who is starving because the carpet factory he was working in, to keep himself fed, has thrown him out because the German company they export to has refused to purchase goods made with child labour. His mother has to look after her paralysed husband, and what she earns as a part-time maid is not enough to feed three mouths. Is Kedar better off? Just because he
has stopped working doesn`t mean he automatically goes to sehool instead.
Our
Article 45 of the Directive Principles of State Policy that we drew up after Independence says, ''The state shall endeavour to provide, within a period of ten years from the commencement of this Constitution, for free and compulsory education for all children until they complete the age of 14``. That promise was made 48 years ago. We also pledged at the World Summit for Children in 1990, ''to take specific steps to improve the lives of children and to provide universal access to basic education by the year 2000.`` Eight years later, and with barely 400 days left for that deadline, that goal too has been abandoned as ''unachievable``. We ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child with 190 other nations worldwide. Subsequently, at the World Conference on Human Rights held at Vienna, we became signatories to the reiteration of the principle of ''first call for children`` and affirmed the ''right of the child not only to survival and protection but also to development and participation``.That Vienna Declaration, adopted five years ago, specifically mentions the problem of ''children in extreme poverty``. Of whom we can claim the largest number in the world - Amartya Sen, who will be receiving the Nobel prize on Human Rights Day next month (10 December) for his analysis of poverty, and whose honour we are hailing with nationwide pride, has observed that ''the world`s largest population of undernourished children is in India`` (not in sub- Saharan Africa). Instead of inviting him to come and be honoured by the state government, if only the state machinery could honour him by taking note of his theories with the emphasis on 'social mobilisation and capacity building`! A year after the Vienna conference, we endorsed the Cairo Programme of Action adopted by the UN world conference, which said that the state should give the highest priority to children (and their) education. The child has the right to be protected from all forms of neglect or negligent treatment`` (Principle 11) And then we came up with an 83rd Amendment, to make education ''a Fundamental Right``. It is now possible to file a petition in the high court demanding implementation of the statutory provision of primary education as a Constitutional obligation. Splendid. Tell that to the Kedars of our society and the hordes of ragpickers roaming the streets, scrounging for bits of paper in rubbish dumps. In the meantime, there is always November 14, 'celebrated` as Children`s Day - singing songs, perhaps organising a 'run` for affluent children who chew gum and come for the T- shirts. What we do through this kind of token is not just an affront to the deprived kids but an obscene affront to boot. The government - state or Central - is not going to deliver. Not today, not by the year 2000, or even ten years later. Because our policy makers are too busy playing politics, wondering how to safeguard their chairs in the ensuing elections, or why they lost in the last one. The people, the marginalised sections in particular, and among them again the children, are nowhere in the reckoning of priorities, because children have no voice and no vote. When six undertrials are blinded with
acid or three die in custody, there are righteous noises about violation
of human rights. But there is not a whimper of indignation over the fact
that 30.02 lakh children under the age of five die each year, in our country.
That is three times the figure for China (even though China`s population
is larger than ours) and ten times that in Indonesia. (The comparable
figure for Japan is 8,000.) Fifty three per cent of our children aged 0-5
are underweight (China`s figure is 16 per cent). Our primary enrolment
is 68 per cent compared to 95 per cent in China and 100 per cent in Japan
(only Afghanistan and Bhutan come lower than us in the Asian table). It
is not even as if China spends more - the percentage of GNP spent on education
is the same in India and China. And we pride ourselves on having joined
the small elite group of nations with nuclear capability.
We make speeches, sing songs on 'Mera Bharat Mahan` and spend money on printing a tricolour logo of the 50th year of Independence on all government stationery. If only that money could have gone into redeeming the future of the millions of children who are ''illegally`` but ineluctably working to stay alive, and the 3 million who never see their fifth birthday because they are too poor to seek medical treatment and escape infections, because they eat only two meals a day! Thirty three per cent of children are born with low birth weight, which automatically makes them vulnerable (only 9 per cent of Chinese newborns are underweight.) Mortality rates for the under-fives are 115 (per 1,000 live births) in India, 74 in Zimbabwe, 90 in Kenya, 19 in Sri Lanka, 15 in Chile, 10 in Cuba, 9 in New Zealand and 6 in Japan. Even Jamaica does better than us in avoiding stunting in children (6 per cent, against our 52 per cent). In this kind of scenario, to say that we have a Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act - passed 12 years ago - and a technical advisory committee for child labour, or that we have increased the number of industries that are prohibited from using child labour from 19 to 62 (last month), is to hide behind paper promises where nothing short of action ''in the field`` will do. As the latest UNDP report on overcoming poverty observes, ''Poverty is not merely a grave social and economic problem but also one of the most widespread violations of human rights``. The bedraggled, snot-nosed urchin whom we shoo away with disgust and tetchiness, is not the culprit or the 'failure of society`. 'We`, who made grand and solemn promises on paper, and ratified bills of rights, are the real failures, the defaulters. Can we truly say that it is the fault of the politicians and their governance, when we are a democracy where the people elect their leaders and are supposed to hold them accountable? Can we distance ourselves from the rag pickers, the child worker, the urban homeless children whose parents toil as construction labourers and therefore have no address, no rights to school admissions, no way of ensuring a better future for their offspring? Can we merely talk about the problem that these flotsam-and-jetsam youngsters create around us, in terms of vandalism and violence, filth and pilfering and begging, when we who share the begging, when we who share the same sidewalks and air fling dust in their faces as we drive past in our bright Marutis, eyes protected by Ray-Ban glasses, while the stereo blares the latest pop, on our way to a night out to 'celebrate` New Year or Diwali? These deprived children may not have degree certificates, but they too are human and can get just as resentful as a rich man`s child. And that resentment is already spilling over in manifestations of increasing urban violence. It will only get worse with enduring injustices. As it happened with Mary Antoinette. No school courses teach social justice, to sensitise our own youngsters to these issues. In fact, compassion is not merely not taught, it is the last thing that is called for or inculcated in today`s survival tactics for ''getting ahead`` - we teach children to push and grab and appropriate, and devil-take-the-hindmost. So what will it be like then this generation grows up, in 10-15 years` time? We, the privileged ones, with education
and security and graduating from middle-class to ''upwardly mobile`` and
from
If the government, the politicians, will not address the issue with the urgency it deserves (look at the way even the education ministers` conference got politicised and trivialised last month), can we, as civic groups and individuals, do something? Yes. If you feel education is a basic human right, you (and even your child) can teach at least one deprived child to read and write. It takes just two months to make them literate. Nothing will empower them as much as giving them the capacity to read and assimilate information. (An aware citizenry is a threat to corrupt politicians, because they will question malpractices and demand accountability and claim their rights). Instead of spending Rs.15 on renting a video film, you can buy a picture book for a street kid (National Book Trust has some low priced ones in all languages). You will not be doing it for charity. It will be survival - for you and your children`s generation. Ignorance results in exploitation, which in turn leads to resentment - and resentment spawns discontent and insurgency. Which means that our fundamental democratic rights get threatened. Education is thus crucial for the masses. A few NGOs are doing this, but the average citizen has still not felt the need to get involved. In Vietnam, such a mass mobilisation for non-conventional literacy worked wonders, despite the ravages of war suffered by that country. Ethiopia and Nicaragua, both with histories of internal strife, have also initiated national literacy projects that have become success stories worth emulating. (Former bureaucrat Lakshmidhar Mishra has written excellent accounts of these low-cost experiments, in his book Anguish of the Deprived. Har-Anand Publications, 1994). The only way we, the people, can redeem the pledge we made to the children of today and the citizens of tomorrow through our Constitution, is to do what Gandhiji advocated - Each one Teach one. That would be the most meaningful and magnificent tribute we pay to the Father of the Nation in the 50th year of his demise, rather than garlanding his statues or showering flowers on his portraits (while tossing his ideas into the nearest dustbin). There are 200 million living flowers in the form of children, waiting for a chance to bloom. Literally from the dust. And flowers, whether they bloom in fancy five-star balconies or in the wayside dust, can be equally fragrant. Try it and see. It could turn out to
be far more satisfying than time and money spent on ''diversions`` for
you and the kids.
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