The Govt Needs to Invest in Ending Poverty to Ensure Children's Rights: CRY

Leading child rights organisation flags the need for a fair allocation for children in the Budget 2010

The State needs to invest in ending child poverty, says CRY. The call to action is drawn from the fact that a key government recommendation (by the Suresh Tendulkar Committee) has shown as many as 37.2% of Indians are living below the poverty line, as against the earlier estimate of 27.5%: an increase of 10%. This means that more children than earlier believed are living in poverty and deprivation.

Children who live and grow in poverty are deprived of almost every fundamental right. They are much more likely to be malnourished, be living in unprotected environments, not enrolled in school and not receiving essential healthcare such as immunisation (See Box: A Status Check on India’s Children) Budgetary allocations must be made keeping this reality in mind.

“CRY’s experience in working in 6700 of India’s most marginalised villages and slums clearly show that the estimation of poverty is far below the reality. In all these areas where we work, we see children are getting lesser to eat than their recommended calorific intake, not completing school and living in inhabitable conditions: But they are technically classified as living above the official poverty line. When we underestimate poverty, planning and budgeting exercises of the government get skewed, which actually worsens the situation,” said Puja Marwaha, Chief Executive, CRY.

The communities CRY works with are people who have lost their means of livelihood, such as forest-dependant tribal people, marginal and small farmers; these are people for whom the government’s safety-net schemes are lifesavers.

“We want to flag the fact that child poverty has detrimental effects not just for children today but carries over to when these children grow up into adults too,” said Marwaha. She further expands, “This situation can be altered only if investments in public services like free primary healthcare centers, anganwadis, schools, ration shops to get low-price grains hospitals are proportionate to the number of children in the country”. 

The actual increase in expenditure on children typically falls short of the number of children added to the population each year. (See Table 1- Outlays for Child-Specific schemes as a proportion of the central budget)

Most developed countries in the world like the USA, UK and France spend around 6-7% of their national budgets for public education and health, while India allocates around 3% for education and around 1% for health. (See Table 2- Public Spending on Education and Health: An International Comparison). For a country that is firmly on a growth path, a decrease in public spending on education and health from 1999-2000 to now, is regressive.

The total allocation for school education and health is well below CRY’s and other child rights advocate’s demand for a tenth of the country’s GDP to be allocated to school education and health. Public spending on basic rights is not just good policy, but also good economics, since an educated, healthy India will enable a robust economy.   

About CRY - Child Rights and You:
CRY – Child Rights and You is India’s leading advocate for child rights. Over 30 years CRY has partnered with NGOs, communities, government, the media to help create a movement that addresses the root causes that deprive children of their rights.

For more information please visit us at www.cry.org