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Home : A New Focus |
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Letter from Ingrid Srinath, Chief Executive, CRY
Dear Friend,
On 07 January this year, Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, made a speech to schoolchildren in which he said: ’I know that you have all grown up, as indeed we have, being told that today’s children are tomorrow’s citizens. Perhaps there is a flaw in that old saying. In a rapidly modernising world, in a world of instant communication, in a country with a young population, today’s children |
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are in fact increasingly today's citizens. You have both the rights and responsibilities of all citizens. I dream of an India in which every child can go to school. An India in which no child goes hungry. An India in which all children have the opportunity to learn, to play, to be healthy and to live a life of dignity and self-respect.'
The fact that Dr. Singh feels so strongly for India's children is heartening. The fact that, almost 60 years since India gained her freedom, these remain mere dreams is deeply disappointing.
Why, in a food surplus nation that's experiencing unprecedented economic growth and has aspirations to global stature, are half our children malnourished and a third out of school? Why will 2 million Indian children die this year from utterly preventable causes? Is it resource scarcity or skewed priorities that prevent us from honouring the commitments we made to our children in our Constitution in 1950 and reiterated when we signed the UN Child Rights Charter in 1992?
27 years of working with these issues have taught CRY that resources have little to do with it. States that are far from the most prosperous in India that have chosen to prioritise education, healthcare, poverty alleviation and social justice have made rapid strides leaving behind their richer counterparts. Countries in our own neighbourhood, poorer than us, are now doing better by their children than we are.
Across over 2500 poor and marginalized communities in 21 states CRY has witnessed the incredible change that is possible when children, parents and local governance come together to ensure their children's rights - to survival, development, protection and participation.
We've learned that the only way to make lasting change happen is to adopt what we call the 'child rights approach'. Stripped of all jargon, what this entails is:
- first, looking at children's issues in their entirety, rather than through the narrow prisms of education, health, child labour, child abuse, foeticide/infanticide etc.
- then, seeking the underlying root causes of the deprivation – gender, caste, livelihoods, displacement and the like
- and finally, mobilising each local community to find long-term solutions to these problems by ensuring the relevant laws and policies that guarantee their rights are actually implemented.
None of these micro-miracles would have been possible without your active support. Over 1,500,000 children across India have opportunities they could not dream of because you chose to make them happen. You have also helped us ensure some better laws to protect children and to get constitutional recognition of the fundamental right to education.
The grim reality, however, is that despite all these many small triumphs within CRY’s reach and the work of thousands of other organisations working with and for children the outlook for most of India’s underprivileged children will not change on a significant scale.
That will require much more.
It will require that we, the citizens of India, start thinking of children, not as objects of sympathy, but as citizens with the same rights that we consider our due.
That we believe, really believe, that every child, regardless of birth and circumstances is truly equal.
That we realise that each child who does not have access to a real education, each child who is compelled to work for a living, each child who is killed, neglected, abused or exploited represents a far more serious violation of our constitution than a murderer walking out of court scot-free.
Finally, we must all – as voters, parents, teachers, investors, neighbours, businesspersons, lawyers, consumers, activists, students, judges, administrators, journalists and politicians alike -overcome our apathy, cynicism and sheer inertia and reconfigure our priorities to put children first.
In a nutshell, CRY believes in child rights for three reasons - because the alternatives are ineffective, illegal and unjust.
To highlight our belief in justice for all India’s children and to make a quantum shift in the awareness of child rights we are changing our name. From April 1, 2006, CRY will stand for Child Rights and You. The change will not be easy. It requires reams of paper-work and permissions, changes to everything from stationery to signage and websites as and when we can afford them.
But most of all, it needs your renewed commitment and support. We have prepared a list of a few statements. We would be deeply grateful if you could select the statements you agree with. Alternatively, you could register your opinions in Voices. Please also feel free to write in, call or e-mail us if you have any questions or comments on child rights or our name change.
Only when enough of us take a stand for child rights will we actually build the India our first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru envisioned in his speech on August 15, 1947 when he said: "We have to build the noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwell."
With faith and goodwill,
Ingrid Srinath
Chief Executive
Child RIGHTS and You
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