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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | India slipping on child wellbeing, indicates report-Aarti Dhar

India slipping on child wellbeing, indicates report-Aarti Dhar

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published Published on Jul 20, 2012   modified Modified on Jul 20, 2012
-The Hindu

8.1 million children are out of school, 42% are underweight

India has slipped by 12 ranks in the global grading on the child development index, which denotes health, education and nutrition, between 1995 and 2010. Japan is the best place in the world to be a child, while Somalia is the worst, a latest report has suggested.

The Child Development Index report released by NGO Save the Children makes an aggregate analysis of the Child Development Index in three time periods — 1995-1999, 2000-2004 and 2005-2010 — of 141 countries across the globe.

India’s poor performance comes in the context of as many as 127 countries having improved their scores during this period. India’s CDI ranking fell by three notches (100 to 103) between 1995 and 1999 and by another nine ranks (103 to 112) between 2005 and 2010. Of the 141 countries ranked, India is among the 14 whose rank has dropped. Some of these include Trinidad and Tobago, Madagascar, and Guatemala.

“Our global Child Development Report is a wake-up call for us. Save the Children has reiterated that economic progress must result in inclusive growth for all, especially the poor and the marginalised,” said Save the Children CEO Thomas Chandy.

India reports 1.25 million infant deaths annually; 42 per cent of its children are underweight; 58 per cent children are stunted by the age of two; and 8.1 million children are out of school with a huge chunk of them being from the rural areas.

Equally-weighted indicators

The CDI, launched in 2008 as a tool to monitor the progress in child wellbeing, calibrates the best and worst places for children and improvements in child wellbeing at the global level and within countries. It enumerates the number of children in school, infant mortality rates and number of underweight children. These three indicators are aggregated by simply calculating the average score between them for each period under review, meaning that they each have equal weighting in the index scores.

The 2012 edition of the CDI shows some encouraging results. On an average, there was a 30-per-cent improvement in the lives of children around the world based on the indicators used. This means that at the end of 2000, the chances of a child going to school were one-third times higher, the chances of an infant dying before its fifth birthday were one-third times lower than a decade before. During this period, child wellbeing improved in 90 per cent of the countries surveyed.

Even more encouragingly, this historic progress has been accelerating dramatically in recent years. From the first half of the 2000s to the second, overall rates of progress in child wellbeing almost doubled, compared to the end of the 1990s (an average improvement of 22 per cent, up from 12 per cent), and primary school enrolment was even more impressive, as the rate of improvement more than doubled during the 2000s (from 11 per cent to 23 per cent; and from 14 per cent to 32 per cent).

Noose of rising prices

However, according to Save the Children, a significant rise in acutely malnourished children threatens the impressive progress in cutting child mortality and getting more children into school. The findings come amid a backdrop of rising food and fuel prices and families finding it harder to afford proper nourishment for their children.

Somalia comes out the worst in the survey, reflecting last year’s deadly food crisis, which killed tens of thousands of children and left hundreds of thousands displaced. West Bank and Gaza fell nearly 50 places — in part as a result of the blockade.

India has fallen 12 spots in child development index

Economic progress must result in inclusive growth for all: NGO

The Hindu, 20 July, 2012, http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/article3660143.ece


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