Submitted by crinadmin on
HAQ’s Third Status Report on India’s children comes at a time when the country is trying to build the image of an emerging economic power, even while contending with a deepening global economic slowdown, preparing itself to host the Commonwealth Games 2010, grappling with the challenges from natural and environmental disasters, and fighting terrorism, insurgency and communal-ethnic violence tearing at its social fabric. A country that has the resources to send an unmanned spacecraft to the moon is however unable to save its children from starvation. Ranking India 66th among 88 countries, the Global Hunger Index 2008 shows that despite close to nine per cent economic growth for the past five years, the hunger situation here is the second worst in Asia and worse than in 25 Sub-Saharan nations. UNICEF has warned that the current global food crisis, with escalating food inflation, has placed more than 150 million children in India at the risk of becoming malnourished. Madhya Pradesh is the hungriest state in the country, followed by Jharkhand and Bihar. Emerging challenges such as rising food prices and diversion of global resources to bio-fuels are severely impacting poor families, who have to cut back on the number of meals in a day. This has a dramatic impact on child nutrition because children need to be fed frequently. Without a major policy shake-up and more efficient implementation of the nutrition programmes, India is unlikely to reach the millennium development goal by 2015. The influence of “corporatisation” of the social sector is there for all to see. Education, health care sectors are already seeing increasing privatisation. Abdication of state responsibility is evident in the increasing moves to hand over the running of institutions, such as care institutions for children to private bodies. This is evident in the raging debate in the government over pre-cooked packaged food versus hot meals for children, first in the mid-day meal scheme and now in the Anganwadis, and the tremendous increase in expenditure on basic services such as education and health. While an average working class family was spending around Rs. 25 per month on education of their children in 1981-82, the amount increased around 1150 per cent, or by almost 12.5 times, to Rs. 306 in 1999-2000. Similarly, expenditure on health care went up by 1037 per cent and on housing by 935 per cent. Further information
pdf: http://www.crin.org/docs/Executivesummary08-1.pdf