STATE LEVEL WOKSHOP ON CRSGS

Children’s rights poorly protected in rural India

By Shayan Ghosh


Participants at the forum on children’s rights in Bangalore on Saturday


BANGALORE—Karnataka is not doing enough to protect the rights of children, specially in rural areas, a spokesman for the state children’s rights commission said Friday, the day before International Child Rights Day.

Vasudev Sharma of the Karnataka State Commission for Protection of Child Rights was speaking at a conference in Bangalore at which panchayats (village councils) discussed how to protect children’s rights ahead of the U.N.-sponsored event.

India signed the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1992. In 2006, the state government’s Rural Development and Panchayat Raj Department sent a circular to every panchayat instructing that they appoint specialized children’s rights gram sabha officers in their jusrisdiction. But at Friday’s meeting, the panchayats expressed uncertainty over how to carry forward the instructions.

“They feel that only having infrastructural development is development,” said Nagasimha G. Rao, campaign coordinator of the Karnataka Child Rights Observatory, a UNICEF-supported body.

To tackle this problem, the government asked Child Rights Trust, another nongovernmental organization funded by UNICEF, to prepare a manual to help the rural administrators understand the circular and put its instructions into practice.

Every child who does not go to school is considered to be a potential child laborer. At that rate, 25 percent of the child population in Karnataka falls into that group, Rao said.

Despite the distribution of the manuals, some gram panchayats have programs for children that focus only on their physical development and do not consider problems they face.

“Our panchayats can say the number of men and women in the area, but they have a very vague idea about the number of children. This shows their lack of concern,” Rao said. “Issues like child labor and their exploitation begin at this grassroots level, where they must be wiped out.”

“Children are being neglected because they are not voters and they have no say in the elections,” said Prakash Mudnakud from Maleyur gram panchayat.