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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Why The Pandemic Is A Child Rights Emergency In India -Namita Bhandare

Why The Pandemic Is A Child Rights Emergency In India -Namita Bhandare

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published Published on Jun 18, 2021   modified Modified on Jun 23, 2021

-Article-14.com

While Covid-19 orphans have dominated mainstream discourse, India’s children silently face an epidemic of other vulnerabilities, including hunger, the loss of school, early marriage and trafficking for sex. How child rights are being rolled back by decades.

New Delhi: The first hint that something was out of place was when Saraswati Pagade, a team member of YUVA (Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action) Navi Mumbai Childline noticed a surge in the number of children begging at the traffic light near her office at Kharghar in Maharashtra’s Raigad district. 

“There is so much hunger here,” said Pagade. “There is no money for food.” On the 1098 Childline number that YUVA attends to, calls reporting children begging and child labour have shot up since Covid’s catastrophic second wave in May, she said.

More than 1,100 km to the north in Jaipur, Rajasthan, siblings 10-year-old Abid* and his elder brother Zahid, 12, began working in a glass bangle factory two months after their father, a daily wage labourer, died of Covid-like symptoms—he was never medically diagnosed or treated—in April 2020 in Dhanarua Block, Patna, Bihar.

The boys had been studying in class 3 and 5, when schools shut and their father died.  With the loss of the family’s sole-earning member, the children were sent to work. Just as the second wave was beginning to explode, the brothers were rescued by a local NGO and reunited with their mother in April this year, said Suresh Kumar, executive director, Centre DIRECT, a Patna-based NGO that helps rebuild the life of trafficked children.

“Trafficking has shot up,” Kumar said. Identifying vulnerable children—who lost a father, whose family took a loan for medical treatment, stretched credit at the kirana store—is easy for traffickers who rely on a network of local informers, including neighbours. Even if children are rescued and united with their families, their vulnerability often makes it simply a matter of time before they are re-trafficked again, said Kumar.

In the 40 years since it was founded in 1980 by Kailash Satyarthi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on child rights, Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA) has rescued 102,302 children—an average of just over 2,500 a year—who have been trafficked for labour or sexual exploitation, sold as bonded labour or otherwise forced to work in contravention of India’s laws.

From January 2020 to 16 June 2021, BBA has with various government agencies rescued 10,417 children, said Rakesh Senger, executive director, Kailash Satyarthi Foundation, a sister organisation of BBA.

At the start of the pandemic in India, as many as 4,334 children were rescued from just one state, Telangana; 3,110 from Uttar Pradesh and 546 from Andhra Pradesh. 

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Article-14.com, 18 June, 2021, https://article-14.com/post/why-the-pandemic-is-a-child-rights-emergency-in-india-60cc0d457cc40


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