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Ramya Kannan
Contents
Introduction
Basic
rights
Discrimination
Reporting
Human Rights
Press
clippings
Links
and resources
Suggested
readings
Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1990 CASE STUDY 2: …(female) infants have been killed using folidol, snuff and pesticide. Wrapping the child in a wet cloth and turning it upside down so it suffocates is another method. With criminal cases of female infanticide being registered and post mortems done, the methods used have undergone a change. Infants are often starved to death and the cause of death recorded as refusal to nurse. The Hindu, 7.3.99 After fifty years of independence and self governance, a girl child does not even enjoy the right to be born in many parts of India. Female infanticide is perhaps the most obscene form of murder - brutal, callous and quite without reason. It continues because society allows it to. And the progress of science and technology has only made it worse. It has brought us to female foeticide, the illegal termination of pregnancy if a female form is detected to be growing inside the womb. Technical advances in ultra-sound scanning have been adopted by unscrupulous operators and ignorant parents to ensure that unwelcome baby girls are denied a chance of life. The Prenatal Diagnostic Technique (Prevention and Misuse) Act of 1994 made sex selective abortions illegal, but the practice continues, more widespread every week. And if the children do survive, then we have to look no further than the abattoirs to understand the kind of existence many of them face. For the slaughter house is just one of the grosser areas of labour to which children are condemned for poor pay and poorer future. Children are charred to death in accidents in the match and fireworks industries in southern Tamil Nadu, they serve as attendants in the burial grounds of India, they slave away in the carpet industry, suffering crippling injuries and tossed aside when maturity reduces the nimbleness of their fingers. International opinion has led to widespread hostility to the sale of goods - particularly carpets, designer clothing and sports gear - made by children, but thousands still work in a multiplicity of hazardous and non-hazardous industries in the country, despite policy level sympathy and a Supreme Court judgement in 1992 ordering each state to make efforts to release children from labour. Here are a few questions we should consider:
International Covenants The world community (with a few exceptions, notably the United States) signed and ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in 1989, and it came into force the following year. India signed in 1992. The Convention set down in firm declarations principles which give the child an inalienable right to identity and individuality, and consign to the dustbin of history the almost universally held notion that children are merely property. The CRC begins with the contention that all children possess rights and sees the child as both valuable and individual - a far-reaching and fundamental change in the international approach to children. The convention, for the first time, defines a child as "every human being below the age of 18 years". It puts forth in its 54 Articles a series of principles that have since guided international work on child rights. Most significantly, it declares - "The best interests of the child" should guide policy and activity. The World Summit for Children in 1990, which followed the CRC, laid down goals to be achieved by the year 2000.
Every child has the inherent right to life. Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 6(1) According to UNICEF's annual State of the World's Children report, India ranked 49th in the under-5 mortality rate in 2000. Notably though, the Infant Mortality Rate - the probability of death between birth and exactly one year of age - has improved considerably. It stood at 144 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1960; by 1998, the figure had come down to 69. The drop can be attributed to the campaign of safe maternity and motherhood practices that has reached into every corner of the country, according to the Ministry of Human Resource Development, but there is room for still more improvement. By international standards, the figure remains high. Female infanticide contributes in no mean measure to India's poor showing on infant deaths. If baby girls are not aborted, they may well be killed at birth or in infancy in some parts of the country, where they are looked upon as expensive to maintain. The killing takes crude forms: smothering a new-born baby, feeding it a whole grain of rice or the poisonous juice of a local plant. Little wonder that there are wide imbalances in the sex ratio in some regions. Towards the end of the nineties, the Indian government began to take note of a growing international concern about institutionalising children. It began a campaign to take children out of care centres to give them homes and families. It was a case of the heart being in the right place, perhaps, but the outcome being less satisfactory. Many non-governmental agencies involved in adoption fell prey to the enormous money that inter-country adoptions could rake in. A flurry of public interest litigations followed, leading to legislation regulating both in-country and inter-country adoptions. More recently, the government has been considering short-stay foster homes as another viable rehabilitation option.
Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 24 Early childhood development is increasingly recognised in India, as elsewhere, as an indicator of the well-being of the children of the nation. But consider India's statistics: We have around 40 per cent of the world's malnourished children
Children die of gastroenteritis and diarrhoea on a regular basis in this country. They are born into a condition called 'cretinism' caused by a lack of iodine, or they go blind due to the lack of vitamin A. India's Integrated Child Services Development Scheme, or ICDS, has worked for over a quarter or a century, trying to take nutrition and supplementary feeding to every child in the country. Beginning as an experimental venture in 1975, ICDS soon spread to a number of states, supplementing, in some cases, a local state initiative. Now in its third phase, and aided by the World Bank, ICDS has been launched in five more states, hoping to replicate its limited success on a much larger canvas. In Tamil Nadu, ICDS is supplemented by the state-run noon meal programme for school children and until recently, the Tamil Nadu Integrated Nutrition Project (now part of ICDS). According to UNICEF study, The Malnutrition Challenge, the impact of ICDS has been significant in reducing the severe and moderate malnutrition category. While in 1992-93, 4.9 percent children in Tamil Nadu suffered from severe malnutrition, in 1997, it had come down to 3.1 per cent. The same study said malnutrition is much higher in South Asia than in Africa, and laid much of the blame on the region's oppressive patriarchy. Attendant factors are: maternal anaemia, weight gain during pregnancy, low birth weight and sanitation and hygiene. Loss of social productivity is also attributed to malnutrition. By this calculation, Bangladesh and India together forfeited a total of $18 million in 1995.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 26 A Bill which aims at making education a fundamental right for every citizen of the country sits in Parliament, waiting to be passed. Some states, such as Kerala and Tamil Nadu, for example, promise free education for children, but questions remain even there:
Statistics provided by the State of the World's Children Report 2000 (UNICEF), raise other questions.
Where do all the missing children go? If there is 100 percent enrolment at the primary stage, why do only half of them reach the secondary grade? The enforced dropout rate among girls is one answer. In many parts of India, once a girl reaches puberty, she is forcibly retained at home. Her tasks include looking after the other children in the family, cooking, cleaning and other household chores. The reasoning is that she will be married into another family and leave. "Why waste money on an education?" Which brings us to two other important issues: child marriage and child labour.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 16(2) Though the Child Marriages Restraint Act has been in force in India since 1929, it seems an ineffective deterrent to parents eager to marry their children off before they even are aware of what is happening to them. The Act prescribes the minimum age for marriage as 21 years for males and 18 years for females. While the Act does prohibit marriages below the age of consent, child marriages persist in many parts of the country because parents take shelter under personal laws.
Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 32 Underpaid, underfed and often working as bonded labourers to pay off familial debts, children well below 14 years of age are a significant part of India's labour force. In December 1996, the Supreme Court ordered a survey of child labourers. It ruled that children who work must be taken out of the labour market, given compensation and sent to school. Very few children have been rescued by this well-meaning but clearly ineffectual order. Tamil Nadu, which has a good number of children working in hazardous industries (match, fireworks, silver smithies) has so far provided compensation to only eight children.
Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 23 For children with disabilities, the primary problem is isolation from the community. With physical or mental problems that inhibit so-called normal functioning, these children risk being the butt of jokes and insults. Natural environments without special adaptations like ramps, wheelchairs and handholds put obstacles in their path, hampering mobility. Children with physical disabilities require extra care and attention in terms of 'disabled friendly' environments and those with mental disabilities require special methods of approach and teaching. This calls for sensitising teachers to the capabilities and needs of the special students. Special training for teaching personnel, it has been proved, can make a qualitative difference. The challenge is integration within the community, according to teachers working with special children. Schools must admit handicapped children and not cite handicap as a reason for denial of admission. A country-wide campaign to integrate the concept of sensitivity to the problems of the handicapped into the learning process could be initiated, they suggest. Rehabilitation activities and special learning skills are being taught to disabled children in order to enable their participation in economic and social activity. ANNEX What reporters can do Promote the widest possible dissemination of information about the CRC and its implications for the exercise of independent journalism Media organisations should regard violation of the rights of children as important questions for investigation and public debate. Journalists must appreciate the vulnerable situation of children. Media persons will strive to maintain the highest standards of ethical conduct in reporting on children's issues, in particular, they shall:
In the words of Eglantyne Jebb, founder of Save the Children Fund,
journalists can find their modus operandi : "If we wish nevertheless
to go on working for the children… the only way to do it seems
to be to evoke a co-operative effort of the nations to safeguard
their own children on constructive rather than on charitable lines".
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