Reuters AlertNet written by Nita Bhalla NEW DELHI (AlertNet) – South Asian nations must promote breastfeeding and focus on better nutrition for under two-year-olds in order to reverse the worst rates of chronically undernourished children in the world, the U.N. said on Wednesday. According to a new report by the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF), more more…
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India still home to largest illiterate population
The Hindu: India still has the largest number of illiterate adults in the world, but has made “rapid advances” in cutting down the numbers of school drop outs, a new UN report on education has said. The Education For All-Global Monitoring Report, released here on Wednesday finds that out of the total 759 million illiterate more…
Poverty in India: a problem on a huge scale
Almost half of India’s children are malnourished; 1000 die every day from diarrhoea; hundreds of millions have no access to proper sanitation. These figures provide a grim counterpoint to the glitzy high-rises and designer shopping malls that have sprung up throughout the country’s major cities.
Crusader Sees Wealth as Cure for Caste Bias
When Chandra Bhan Prasad visits his ancestral village in these feudal badlands of northern India, he dispenses the following advice to his fellow untouchables: Get rid of your cattle, because the care of animals demands children’s labor. Invest in your children’s education instead of in jewelry or land. Cities are good for Dalit outcastes like us, and so is India’s new capitalism.
Dwindling states’ share in education worries Govt
States such as Maharshtra, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Delhi and Bihar spend less than two per cent of their Gross State Domestic Product (GSDP), he said.
Underprivilaged Children must be given Special Care
Various studies have revealed that poverty can be reduced by sending children from India’s disadvantaged groups to schools instead of sending them to work. If a child is in school, adults of his/her family will get work from where the child used to work. When the child of family goes for work then, adults of that family generally sit idle and the wages earned by the children are ill spent by their family. The employers prefer to engage children on work rather than adults so that they have to pay less wages to children. In this way children are exploited.
India’s children and the Class Struggle
Fifty years into Independence, India’s children have little to celebrate: 6.3 crore (63 million) of them are still out of school. This despite the constitutional directive urging all states to provide “free and compulsory education for all children until they complete the age of 14 years”. The Constitution envisaged fulfilling this promise by 1960. Yet, if present trends continue, India is still 50 years away from reaching the goal.
Dalit boy killed for writing poem to upper caste girl
In a recent example of India’s horrific caste system, a 16-year-old Dalit school boy died after he was thrashed almost unconscious in front of other students by an upper caste teacher for writing a poem to an upper caste girl. He was also beaten by family members of the girl the next day, found semi-conscious and taken to hospital where he later died. Local leaders have sought an inquiry into the incident as the police appear to be siding with the upper caste girl’s family and the teacher. ->> MeriNews | Read the Full Story
The class ceiling
India’s 17 years of economic change have widened the gap between rich and poor. More than a quarter of the population lives below the official poverty line, subsisting on roughly $US1 ($1.04) a day; one in four city dwellers lives on less than 50 cents a day; and nearly half of all children are malnourished. ->> SMH | Read the Full Story