Article Source : ABP

Author : Vijayalakshmi Balakrishnan

Date of Issue : Sep 28 2005

Title of Article : Childhood dilemmas

Details :

On his website, the President of India hosts a children's corner, where he answers children's questions. There are 590-odd questions posed by children from literally every corner of India and some from overseas. Questions range from four-year-old Kabir's demand to know why the sun is so hot and what holds the moon up in the sky, to Manoj's scepticism with the idea of an open book examination. Each question has been replied to and while the answers may not be everything the child wants to hear, they display a level of serious engagement with children, a willingness to treat them as equals, a characteristic and approach still quite rare.

But the Children's Corner is not just about the President and his answers. It is about the issues that concern children, and that list envelops the entire gamut of public affairs. Sifting through atmospherics and quickly getting to the core, children have been able to identify root causes of their situation while most institutions and individuals working on children's issues are still grappling. A child from Tamil Nadu points out that sprinklers have just begun to be used in his fields and that this has positively impacted on the yield of the onion crop. While pleased with the results, he was concerned about the lack of adequate information on technical advances and also inadequate research into the methodologies for farming. Going deeper he pointed out there are 250 engineering colleges in Tamil Nadu, but few agricultural universities "if this is improved and if there is a mechanism to reach the ordinary people, then we can do wonders in agriculture", he observed.

On the site, children's questions have ranged from the specific, "Whenever a new government comes to power it interferes with the syllabus - creates problems as the books are made available by mid-session, Can't it be stopped" to the systemic, why is there this emphasis on becoming engineers, doctors, managers etc., "there is hardly any emphasis on becoming good humans" to the existentialist, "whom should we have more faith in, God or science".

Concerns about children have primarily been seen as linear, meeting basic needs, provision of more of the same, to a larger and larger number until every child is reached. Government documents and alternative reports from the large and growing development community are a morass of facts and counter facts, statistics to prove this point or to counter that one. And as the children's corner proves, the issues raised as concerns whether by adults or children are the same. Interesting to note are the differences in the dimensions, the patterns and the linkages, the nuanced understanding of reality that children so vividly describe. They raise the same issues as adults and yet present them so differently.

Nowhere is this so starkly depicted as in issues concerning the girl child. Of the 590-odd questions on the President's website, only three directly relate to the life experiences of girls. From the adult perspective all the three girls who asked questions are part of India's success story. All are being educated, one is studying biotechnology at university, the other two are in school, one in a government school in central India, the other in a minority-run, aided institution in western India. All three have opportunities for growth not available to their mothers certainly and perhaps not even their fathers.

Yet, the children who are beneficiaries of the more of the same approach to development continue to face the same set of dilemmas that their mothers faced, decades earlier. All of their questions relate to change processes. One wants outlining of future direction for girls as a collective, another for details of plans for girls from a specific community and the third about ways to reach out and chase dreams, while finding that social norms limit horizons.

Today is Girl Child Day, a day for introspection, a time many adults will ask why girls continue to be denied opportunities to grow, to develop and dream. And they will not be wrong. A country where incidents of female feticide are growing, where malnutrition rates are climbing, where girls are trafficked to pay debts and where a majority of girls who enter school drop out, before completing Class V has little to celebrate. Countering this dismal picture, others who point to the growing numbers in school, the singular successes in sports and academia. Neither side is entirely wrong. Yet crucial to defining the future is an emphasis on which voices are heard and which excluded in decision-making about children.

Currently, the process through which the agenda on children, especially the girl child is set excludes the voices of those most affected by the state policies and societal norms, enforced by community pressure and family ties. The girls who reached out to the President and asked him questions, were the products of the systemic approach to change and yet their life experiences showed that the change though welcome was inadequate, it showed them a different future and the many pathways to get there but not how to loosen the ties that bind.

Without perhaps even realising it, our approach to girls and their development, is defined by our limited understanding of how little the experience of childhood has changed for girls. Paulo Freire, an educationalist has said that a lot of developmental activity "does not swim in the cultural waters of the people".

Among the questions, asked, was "What is Achievement?" The President's reply, "That which gives happiness and fulfilment." On that benchmark, the life experiences of the girls who wrote in to the President are testimony to failure - of the state and society's approach to childhood. Much has changed, but not nearly enough.

(The author is GM, Policy & Research, CRY, Child Relief and You)