India takes a thrashing in child index survey

The shabby way in which India treats its children was reflected in a new global survey, where the country's position on the child development index (CDI) of 141 nations fell by 12 places between 1995 and 2010. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Jul 20, 2012, 02:16:22 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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India shabby treatment of its children is reflected in a new global survey released on Thursday which says the country’s position on child development index (CDI) of 141 nations has fallen by 12 places between 1995 and 2010 because of not much improvement in child development indices.

India is among 14 countries including many African nations and its neighbor Nepal and Pakistan whose ranking has fallen. “India’s CDI fell by three ranks between 1995 and 1999, by another nine ranks between 2005 and 2010,” the report released by international NGO Save the Children said.

Bangladesh and Sri Lanka in south Asia are better than India in the overall ranking with stark improvement in school enrollments and health indicators. "Five large countries – India, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Pakistan and China – account for about half the global under-five mortality," the report said

The report ranking India as 112 comes at the time several incidents of abuse of child rights have been reported from across the country including a child being forced to drink her urine for bedwetting in a school in Shantiniketan.

The damning aspect of the report is that India has been rated as fastest growing economy after China in recent years but the growth does not seem to be reaching its children. Among the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) --- called club of fastest growing economies --- India has the lowest CDI.

“Three – Brazil, South Africa and Russia – are on the diagonal (that is, they occupy the same quartiles of the CDI and the Human Development Index). China and India both qualify as of medium development on the HDI; but while China is in the highest quartile of the CDI, India is in the lowest,” the report said.
It also highlighted that China has prioritized investment in children resulting its CDI being two quartiles higher than HDI. But India has failed even though the economic competitors score highly on net enrolment rates. “More than 40% of India’s children are moderately or severely underweight, compared to less than 5% of China’s; and India’s under-five mortality rate exceeds 60 out of 1,000, while China’s is below 20,” the report said.

Because of this, India is the only national among emerging economies whose child development index has fallen between 2005 and 2010, the survey said.

India’s child record

7 per 1,000 live births result in deaths

42 % of children under-weight

58% stunted by age of two years

8.1 million out of school children out of 190 million

India has least score on child development index among emerging economies --- China, Brazil, South Africa and Russia.

India’s position fall the most on the index in the last five years.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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