Dinesh Kamath's Editorial 'Make this world a better place for Children' that was published in Newsband

Make this world a better place for Children

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) was adopted around 25 years back. But even after that has the world become a better place for children?

The importance given to investment in early childhood development, providing of more primary health-care services to promote maternal care and free more children from malnutrition and disease has yielded positive results. There is indeed 50% reduction in mortality rates in the under-five age-group, enrolment in early childhood education nearly doubled between 1990 and 2012, many in the age group of 3-4 years in many low and middle-income states got access to preschool programmes and so on.

But Universal secondary education is still a far cry in many parts of the world. The concerns over child abuse, adoption and the involvement of children in armed conflict are still raised. Nearly half the number of children in the primary school age group who are out of school reside in countries torn by civil strife. Child trafficking represents 27 per cent of trafficking in humans and where two out of every three victims are girls. In countries such as India, recourse to the selective abortion of female foetuses represents the most brutal violation of basic human dignity.

Children have no capacity to exercise and affirm their rights. They depend on the protection from positive laws and healthy parenting. Since this is the case, the governments should allocate more funds for free education for underprivileged children, provide them books, uniforms, healthy mid-day meals and moreover their parents should be given some sort of work or some help so that they are not forced to make their children to work to earn for the family. If we have millions and millions to feed, we have millions and millions pairs of hands to work.

Child labour is the practice of engaging the children in the economic activities. It not only take away their childhood but also affects the physical, intellectual and spiritual stature of the child. Continuous efforts are being made by the government and civil societies but still these are not sufficient.

Recently Kailash Satyarthi has been rewarded globally for his work for child welfare and for rescue, rehabilitation of child labourers. He has set example for rest of India to come forward for the rescue and prohibition of child labourers .

Child rights are grossly violated in India. Our successive governments are less concerned about poverty than about building smart cities and fast trains. Poverty is the mother of every problem. Nobody wants their child to survive in adversity. Exploiting children starting from collection of traces of precious metal in the filthy gutter below the jewelry shops by filtering the effluent with a fine piece of cambric to the execution of the sinister design of a terrorist is the result of the abundance of the orphans across world. Depriving a child's education and subjecting him to fall in the bracket of child labour due to poverty is not a skill development but a killing of the personality development of the child in the society. It is anticipated that commissions like National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) would definitely play a leading role in ensuring child rights.

Much has been written about the neglect, exploitation and abuse of children, but not much about their exploitation as soldiers. Child soldiers are seen as a cheap and expendable commodity and are abducted and used as spies, assassins and mine detectors. The U.N.O should not just provide statistics but also do something drastic to prevent these ugly happenings. Providing statistics is quite an easy job but the world needs a solution to fight with the problems pertaining to exploitation of children.