Thursday, November 5, 2009

Submission to Ms. Navanethem Pillay UN High Commissioner for Human Rights

Even as average income rises and poverty level goes down, hunger and inequality are increasing in many parts of India. Growing consumerism, conflict and violence, lack of access to education and health, and exclusionary policies are making children more vulnerable. No child is safe and girls, dalit, disabled, tribal and minority children are more at risk because of their marginalised socio-economic status.

1.Discrimination and exclusion continues
Despite constitutional guarantees and legal provisions, children continue to be discriminated against on the basis of caste, ethnicity and gender. Discrimination is at the base of many child rights violations. Children from certain socio-economic backgrounds, such as the poor, minorities, tribal, dalit or migrant, face discrimination in many ways. They are less likely to be able to access education and health care services but more likely to be victims of violence and exploitation, trafficked and recruited as child soldiers, and represented among juveniles who are imprisoned. The plummeting sex ratio is a shameful reflection of the discrimination faced by women and girls even today. It is a violation of their very right to life. Clearly, existing mechanisms are inadequate to deal with discrimination and exclusion. Also, apart from existing discriminations new forms of discrimination and exclusion must be recognised and addressed.

a. Development and economic policies designed to lead to further exclusion
An analysis of the programmes and the way they are implemented shows they often lead to further marginalisation and exclusion. Forced evictions and displacement for development and urbanisation; loss of jobs for adults; agricultural policies leading to farmer suicides, and growing consumerism are putting children at risk. Children are being forced out of school and into labour, falling prey to trafficking and abuse. Privatisation has made health services very costly and beyond reach of a large number of families. Almost always, the already backward and marginalised, girls or the disabled child are the first to be excluded or abused. We believe unless all government policies and actions, be it the agricultural policy, the drugs policy, the policy on displacement and rehabilitation, forest laws, mining policy, are examined from a child rights lens, any attempt to address violation or denial of children’s rights will be defeated, pushing more and more children out of the social safety net.

2. Change in rhetoric, little change in practice
Over the years the government has adopted a rights-based language for any intervention concerning children. It has also undertaken some changes in law, policy and programming. But this rhetoric is just window-dressing for the worsening indicators for children. Not enough resources or attention is being paid to change rhetoric into practice. Thus the Human Rights Commission and the Treaty Bodies need to pay much greater attention to examining the actual situation on the ground to find the real change (or the absence of it) in the lives of children.

a. Abdication of state responsibility
There is an increasing trend towards abdication of state responsibility, which is evident in the increasing moves to hand over the running of institutions, such as care institutions for children to private bodies and the tremendous increase in expenditure of families on basic services such as education and health, much of which has been privatised. While private-public partnership must be encouraged, core services such as health, education, sanitation, water, running of juvenile justice institutions, etc. must continue to be the responsibility of the State, with private or non-government organisations providing part, additional or technical support services.

b. Transparency and accountability issues
Increasingly the State is implementing its programmes through autonomous societies that it registers in the districts and states. The budget is transferred directly to these institutions and is not reflected in the state’s budget documents. All its flagship central programmes such as for education for all, reproductive and child health, and rehabilitation of child labour are implemented in this manner. The recently approved Integrated Child Protection Scheme too will follow the same route. Since these programmes are kept out of the state machinery and are governed by different rules, it becomes difficult to monitor them and pin accountability. There is a critical need to not just examine the general measures of implementation being put in place, but also the manner in which they are being implemented.

3. Children Increasingly Unprotected


a. Right to name and nationality remains a challenge
Birth registration is fundamental to the civil and political rights of every child and must be ensured immediately. For millions of children across India, this basic right is still not fulfilled depriving them of the official document that is the foundation for them to exercise their rights and access services, and the basis for their recognition as citizens. Lack of Birth registration is a denial of name and nationality.

b. Child abuse and violence
India has the world’s largest number of sexually abused children as well as working children. Violence against children has emerged as the most pressing problem. Government records say there has been a 36.2 per cent increase in crimes against children between 2005 and 2007. On a daily basis, children confront ethnic and communal violence, state-sponsored violence, sexual abuse and exploitation in all forms. Yet, protection finds the lowest priority in government’s programming. India does not have a proper estimate of the number of children who need special protection. Available data is limited to crimes against children that are reported to the police but many crimes go unreported. Every year, a huge number of children go missing. Even in this day and age, children have to deal with increasing child sacrifice, infanticide, killing of daughters, and child marriage, crimes that are inexplicably increasing with modernisation of society.

Children are being recruited into armed combat by both state and non-state actors.

c. Increase in child trafficking
Trafficking of children has grown to alarming proportions. Discrimination and exclusion from basic social services and economic gain has been a prime factor in trafficking, which is more common among the poor and the marginalised. The war of survival forces the poorest communities to often sell their children. Social exclusion based on gender greatly increases the risk of being trafficked for girls. India is described as a “source, destination and transit country for men, women and children trafficked for the purposes of forced labour and commercial sexual exploitation”. Children are trafficked for all kinds of purposes. Yet the law on trafficking does not define trafficking and only deals with trafficking for prostitution, and indeed till recently only dealt with girls. India has yet to ratify the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children (Palermo Protocol).

d. Juvenile Justice
Despite changes in the juvenile justice law, which deals with both children in need of care and protection as well as children in conflict with law, its implementation remains an area for concern and attention. Lack of knowledge, abuse by the police and in institutions, inadequate resources and large-scale corruption plague the system.

e. Failure to ensure universalisation of education and elimination of child labour
Despite a constitutional amendment to make education a fundamental right, it has yet to become a law. More importantly, the continuation of a law that allows child labour can never ensure universalisation of education. Children drop out of school—rather, are squeezed out of the education system--because of their own socio-economic status as well as the situation in the schools, adding to the exclusion that is already a blot on our education system. There are wide gaps between urban and rural school attendance and wider disparities between the richest and the poorest households. The draft Bill on Right to Education before Parliament and the system of education currently implemented allows for disparate and unequal education, which will perpetuate exclusion.

3. Lack of Synergy and Convergence
Despite the recognition that there needs to be a convergence of approaches and services meant for children, this has not happened. Each department or ministry operates as a stand-alone mechanism for planning and implementation. One of the prime examples of this is the Government’s inability to put together a periodic report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in the specified time as the other department’s and ministries do not co-operate with the nodal Ministry for Women and Child Development. Even the mechanism to monitor implementation of child rights ha failed.
Enakshi Ganguly Thukral
Co-Director 23 March 2009