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India: dangerous for children?

A recent poll, which was part of a Reuters AlertNet campaign to focus on neglected humanitarian crises, names India as the sixth most dangerous place on earth — for children. It suggests they are more at risk here than in conflict-ridden war-torn regions such as Afghanistan, the Palestinian Territories, Myanmar, and Chechnya. India, in fact, ranks just better than Darfur in Sudan, Northern Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Somalia. Those polled include experts from international aid agencies and the idea is to highlight the lack of coverage of these issues in the international media. The respondents, who were not given a specific definition of the word `dangerous', were nevertheless given a list of indicators of deprivation — such as hunger, malnutrition, lack of access to education and health care, child labour, gender discrimination, child sexual abuse, and factors like exposure to violence — to include in their assessment as being threats to a safe childhood. India's precise ranking as the world's sixth most dangerous place, reflecting angularities in the exercise, does seem over the top. However, enough of what has emerged is uncomfortably close to the truth, highlighting the distressing condition of millions of children in India.

The poll points out that despite India's emergence as an economic powerhouse, 1.2 million children under five die from malnutrition every year. Despite being the third largest producer of food and the third largest defence spender in the world, the country is unable to safeguard its children from hunger, malnourishment, and other kinds of dire exploitation ranging from child labour to child sexual abuse and trafficking. The continuing invisibility of children and their exclusion from a framework of rapid economic growth indicates that as a country we are not meeting our elementary obligations to the most vulnerable within our communities. As this year's State of the World Children's Report from UNICEF points out, half the world's undernourished children live in South Asia. India's malnutrition rate stands at 47 per cent, the same as Ethiopia's. As far as child labour is concerned, the 2001 Census reports a figure of 12.7 million working children but the numbers are likely to be three times higher. There is no question that the majority of children in India are subject to various forms of severe deprivation, but it can be argued that the word `dangerous' used in the Reuters poll is misleading as it evokes images of war, rape, kidnapping, and landmines — situations of extreme peril, not descriptive of the landscape of every day India. In exercises like these, well-meaning international agencies out to make a moral impact on behalf of children must learn to keep a just sense of proportion in projecting the facts. Exaggeration and over-the-top assertions will prove counter-productive.

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