HEALTH FOR CHILDREN IN INDIA

• About 27 million children are born each year in India; but nearly 2 million of them do not live to the age of 5 much of this is due to mal-nutrition and other poor health conditions
• India has 200 million people in hunger and over 40% who do live till 5 are malnourished
• Immunization is very low by world standards
• 79% of children under the age 3 have anaemia. Half of children have reduced learning capacity because of iodine deficiency

CHILDREN’S EDUCATION IN INDIA

• Though majority of children are enrolled in school, half of them do not attend regularly. Many of them are forced to work and earn for their families.
• After five years of schooling fewer than 60% can read a short story or do simple arithmetic
• According to the 2011 census, there are 444 million children in India under the age of 18, which is 37% of the total population. One in four children of school-going age is out of school. ie. 99 million children in all have dropped out. Only 2% of schools offer completed school education from Class 1 to Class 12.

CHILD LABOUR IN INDIA

• Official figures indicate that there are over 12 million child workers in India, whereas the NGOs reckon the figure at 60 million; and in this the boys and girls ratios vary too less
• The largest numbers work in places like textile factories, dhabas (road-side restaurants) and hotels or as domestic servants.
• Children are employed in the hazardous works like fire-crackers factories, match stick factories with appalling work conditions, robbing their childhood.
  • There are more than 200,000 child labourers employed in India’s match-box industry. Forced to work, deprived of education and their basic needs, these children suffer the consequences of a society that looks at them with indifference.
• India has 10.12 million child labourers aged between 5 to 14 years (National Census 2011).
• According to the Global Slavery Index 2016, there are nearly 18 million modern slaves in India, who are victims of forced labour ranging from prostitution and begging to child labour. This is the highest in the world.
• South Asia more than 100 million children are treated as beasts of burden, including over 12 million in India.

CHILD ABUSE IN INDIA

(In 2007 the Indian government published one of the world’s largest studies on ‘Child abuse’ being carried out in conjunction with the UNICEF and ‘Save the children.’ This detailed research on 12,000 children produced some shocking conclusions: )

• Two thirds of children are victims of physical abuse (beaten in the school, made to work seven days a week)
• Over 50% faced some kind of sexual abuse, while 20% of them faced severe abuse.
• Half of the children also face emotional abuse

CHILD MORTALITY

• India had the largest child mortality rate world-wide in 2012 with 1.4 million children dying before reaching their fifth birth-day (UN)
• According to International Food Policy Research Institute’s 2011 Global Hunger Index (GHI) the country ranks a lowly 67 out of 81 countries. There are more than 23 crore people in India who go to bed hungry, 6 crore children are malnourished and 7% of them pass away before the age of five.
• Every 8 minutes, a child goes missing. Over the last 10 years, crimes against children has increased 5 times over. Fear of failure in examinations in the second highest cause of suicides in children.
• An estimated 1.1 million children die every year within one year of their birth due to lack of immunisation.

CHILDREN SOLD OR ABANDONED

• The UN estimates that 50 million children (dalits) aged 4 and above are sold for child labor to help provide money for their families, making as low as Rs.12 (20 cents) per day. They are part of 150 million child laborers aged 4 to 14 worldwide.
• Of 11 million Indian children abandoned by their parents, 90% are girls.