'India?s children deserve better'

Prof Amartya Sen regrets that children have not gained from India?s economic growth, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Published on: Dec 20, 2006, 02:05:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen on Tuesday expressed regret that children have not gained from India’s economic growth and termed the high incidence of female feticide as a “national calamity”.

Delivering the foundation day lecture of the Institute for Human Development, Sen pointed out the startling contrast between India’s growing economy and its poor record on social indicators. “We still have high incidence of undernourished children,” he said, adding that some states have improved but the country as a whole has not done well.

While praising the Supreme Court got for its order on the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS), Sen expressed displeasure over the increasing number of anaemic children and the number of children — a whopping 40 per cent — who are only partially covered by the government’s immunisation programme or not at all. He also pointed out that gender inequality casts a shadow on child nutrition as a weak mother will deliver a malnourished child. He urged the government to review the social sector schemes.

According to Sen, one area where India’s record has not improved is female feticide. “In west and north India, the ratio of girls to boys is falling. The ratio is only equal to the European ratio in the southern and some eastern states,” he said. There has been a sharp decline in girl birth ratio from the 1991 Census (94.4) to the 2001 Census (92.7), he added.

Speaking of international sex ratios, Sen said the ratio in Korea is 88 girls to 100 boys while it is 85 to 100 in China. “Like us, China also want boys,” he said.

On the theme of the lecture, ‘Children and Human Rights’, Sen favoured human rights to influence legislation on child rights but cautioned that legislation alone cannot work. “Bring in institutions that create awareness about child rights and provide additional understanding of children,” was his suggestion on implementation of child rights.

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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