Action plan for kids must: Vi Ma

Kulkarni now settled at Chinchwad, Pune, was associated with the Indian Council of Child Welfare (ICCW). He was its executive director in the 1960’s. He had written a letter addressed to the late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi suggesting the idea of forming a commission for child welfare. He, however, says the suggestion was made years ago. Now is the time to go ahead with the task, he observes.

Adequate coordination between primary education, pre-school education, maternal and child health programmes, and family welfare activities is very necessary. The commission, he feels, should look into the work of government agencies at various levels. It should also monitor voluntary agencies, courts, police and other institutions, with a request to study the state of the children and make suggestions and expand child development and welfare programmes to give Indian children a new deal.

“While their pupolation has increased over the years, little improvement in the magnitude and standard of the welfare programmes is seen," he observes. There are deficiencies in the educational system. Even though, a large number of children enroll in schools the drop-out rate is very high during the first four standards. There is also heavy stagnation. The expansion of education over the years has mostly been quantitative.

Ill-equipped and uninspiring school buildings and environments prevail in most of the places for children between 6 and 11, in rural and urban areas. In a developing country, primary education has to be a child development and welfare programme, he says. Coming from economically poor families, the neglected children are exposed to moral dangers. Uncared for by families and ill-fed they run away from the so-called "homes" and become waifs and strays.

Many children start working and earning in life early as they and their parents realise that the present-day education system does not provide them with skills to enable them to participate in the national economic activity and earn their bread honestly and with self-respect. The problem of child labour is big where a large number of them are working in hazardous jobs.

More children are working in the unorganised sectors of the economy. All the provisions of the labour laws are violated as children and their parents need bread, and the employers need cheap labour. Kulkarni feels it is high time that the small family norms be widely accepted and practiced. “It is utter callousness that more children are given birth to in utter disregard to the ability of providing a decent minimum level of living. The children are subjected to human suffering because of material deprivation and emotional neglect”.

The few institutions where boys and girls are `detained’ in the so called protective custody for care, protection, training and rehabilitation, are under fire, because many of the detainees are just poverty related cases. There have been several petitions in the court cmplaining against the sub human conditions under which the children are made to work in the name of training as forerunner to their economic rehabilitation. Also the number of institutions for the physically and mentally handicapped, blind, deaf and mute, is also very few, considering the requirements of such children. We need zest, imagination, management skills and understanding of extraordinary type to achieve the objectives of child welfare, Kulkarni, who has authored several articles on the subject, comments.