The Abhijit Banerjee trio winning this years’ Nobel Prize for economics gives hope
From the multiple challenges that the children face today! And India faces these multiple challenges with this year’s UNICEF report’s dire warning to India in particular. The children under five are the most affected in the world and India doesn’t stand out as a shining example. What has gone wrong with our policy making and policy implementation? These are questions that should hit our collective conscience.
Educators! Wake up! Speak out! Anybody who matters have spoken out? No! The Global Hunger Index reveals India in a pretty low status. At 20.8 % this is the highest ratio in the whole of the world. There is acute malnutrition in India and this needs urgent attention.
Children’s education is perhaps the most difficult of all challenges before this government. Malnutrition is a subject for experts in health, nutrition, education and a multiple of fields. Over the last four years India has slipped nine ranks, to 102 out of 117 nations. Who were in charge of these departments? Any enquires were made?
Media is now cowed down. So, no one dares to question the persons in charge. Now, there are many important related issues in children’s well-being, from health to nutrition to the very quality of education. We also read the other day the new illness, the mental health of youngsters. It is suggested that we need to appoint mental counsellers and also attend to the overall education and cultural needs of children who are now all driven by exam results and also more tuition and less teaching in the old-fashioned ways.
Also, there are now new ills. Corruption and tax raids! One school in one small city, not even city, a town with a school had multiple locations where it has operations in impersonating candidates and getting converted government quota seats for medical colleges into management quotas and there by sealing the quota seats for the highest bidders,.
There are other issues like out of school children. Has any government spoken of the out of school children? How the RTI ACT is working? Has the Compulsory 25% admission to neighbourhood schools working? And in the state of mass lynching, namely UP, we have the spectra of malnutrition in six of the ten districts with the highest rates stunted in UP alone. So, we have to also think of children left as orphans whose parents were subjected to lynching! So, society and policy is changing and we have disinterested or disobedient bureaucrats sitting in chairs from which they don’t budge. So, there is a summary sacking of secretaries!
So, education is no more a noble profession, it is sheer business activity and you don’t think of any humanitarian virtues in your education services! However, the stunted children, the orphaned children of the mob lynched victims are faces and pictures that would haunt the civilized sections of society and we, the helpless public might have to wait for the day when final relief would be forth coming! The children of such affected go through indescribable trauma and the faces and the pictures in daily newspapers and TV visuals continue to haunt us, the public and hopefully the policy makers as well!