Children Of A Lesser God C P Surendran | The Times of India | December 08, 2006
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/OPINION/Editorial/Children_Of_A_Lesser_God/articleshow/725656.cms Barely a fortnight ago, the Bihar government decided to help Chuhiya and her family financially. Eight year-old Chuhiya earns her keep at a dhaba in Patna. The real reason Chuhiya was chosen for the administration's benefaction is a camera. She figured on a UNICEF postcard in a campaign against child labour. If Chuhiya weren't a picture, the media wouldn't have noticed that the child, like a million others in Bihar, was going through rites of what psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim termed "dis-integration of personality". Bettelheim would know, he was a Nazi concentration-camp survivor. Last fortnight, media reports drummed up a campaign that the Bihar administration could not ignore. How could a UNICEF pin-up child be refused her right to life? Real life, and there is so much of the ghastly thing teeming around us, is a bitch in a ditch, and it leaves us cold. But an image is different. An image exacts from us actionable ethical impulses, simply because it's one remove away from our physical environs. Image is reality sanitised through distance. And these are mediated times. The image is the real thing. Thanks to the incident of the post-card then, Chuhiya might now join a school. What about 12 million children (a government estimate) roaming the Indian streets, doing things they should not be doing to make both ends meet? According to the Human Rights Watch report, the number of street children is 115 million. If truth is somewhere in between, it is still a number large enough to populate several European countries. Only four out of 10 enrolled children complete class X, says Human Development Report 2006, and nearly six out of 100 children do not survive beyond the age of one. What is the social and economic cost of these infantile phantoms hovering in the wings of the Great Indian Opera? If they were to migrate to Europe, those countries would have no option but declare themselves under a state of emergency. But in India, we are talking about superpowerdom, with the rate of growth rocketing past 9 per cent. Never mind a global press gently mocking at our smugness. Where is the welfare, without which no society can claim it is civil? The Maharashtra government is yet to implement most of the key recommendations of its child development policy. The policy drafted by the state's Women and Child Development Department makes charitable noises like the "need for planned and structured "policy inputs. Authorities have gone on record saying that money is not the problem, that "in fact a lot of funds go waste". According to an official, it is a "question of making public institutions more accountable". Yet what makes these words dream-like as in a Bergman movie is, for instance, an announcement by the state government on the eve of Children's Day that it would "treat 1,200 underprivileged children to a day at the circus". How do we meet life and death issues armed with a trapeze in one hand and a wriggling bear in the other? Outside the promised circus, real issues burn with blinding brightness. According to Delhi police sources, nearly 46 million children are estimated to be missing in the country. When they eventually surface far away from where they were born and long after, we see them as beggars, bonded labourers, delinquents. There is no central agency looking into this vanishing act. Very recently, the police arrested a man running a private shelter for girls in Ghaziabad on charges of rape and wrongful confinement of inmates. This is not the first case of juvenile home abuse. Private or public, juvenile homes in India are straight out of Dante's Purgatory. Maharashtra alone has over 40,000 children whose souls are on fire in these homes. Why pick on Maharashtra? Last year, the state wheedled over 40 per cent of the Rs 16 crore national grant for social maladjustment schemes, being run in these homes. The state government itself has put in an equal amount into these efforts. It is a moot point whether the money finds its way towards the destitute Indian child. On October 10, the Union government banned children below the age of 14 from working in residences, hospitality industry and hazardous jobs. This was all very well, but there has been no follow-up. Nor is it clear how boys and girls freed from labour are to support themselves in the utter absence of an income. A sensible debate on the issue would have raised questions of rehabilitation of nearly 20 million children "rescued" from hostile environments. Where do these children go? What do they do with their newly found time? Are they equipped to relate to society at large? Do they have special schools? In the absence of back-ups, would it have been better to allow them to disintegrate bone by bone in anonymous assorted jobs and soften them up occasionally with a free ticket to the circus? India is pretty good at flaunting its achievements. We have in men like Amartya Sen, international champions of the Indian model: How, for instance, India prevented famine since Independence due to a free press and its democratic political structure, held accountable by the media. But Sen, as argumentative an Indian as any, does not see the apocalyptic reality of nearly naked hollow-eyed hordes roaming the sun-baked urban vastness of India in search of food and shelter, and perhaps love. Is the same system that kept the famine at bay responsible for the interminable drought of spirit that sanctions star-crossed children a day at the circus, and dark desolation when the clowns call for the curtain?
