Editorial
Children living below the poverty line
Developing human resources means caring for the child
One does not need much wisdom to know how vulnerable Bangladesh's children are to a host of circumstances. And that is a truth which once more has been highlighted, this time through the grim statistics provided by Unicef. Over three crore children in the country are condemned to live in dire poverty, which is as much as to say that they subsist below the poverty line. Now, with 45 per cent of the country's population comprising children and with 46 percent of those children leading lives that are way below accepted definitions of poverty, the risks to which our children are exposed are all too manifest. Add to these worries those which have patently been brought out into the open by last Friday's issue of the Star magazine, which informs us in no uncertain terms that the problems which children and mothers face in Bangladesh are related not just to hunger. There are too such crucial issues as under-nourishment and malnutrition. How else should one explain the fact that as many as 43 percent of children in Bangladesh happen to be too short or stunted for their age?
Poverty is not only about the state of those directly affected by it. It is also a bad reflection on a country's present and clearly threatens to cast long shadows on its future. The realities on the ground are these: a very large number of children from poor and ultra-poor families are compelled to work in order to supplement the family income or, in most cases, serve as sole bread winners for the family; an inadequacy of food results in terrible malnutrition for them; such a lack of health and financial resources deprives them of the education they ought to come by from the state; and, most worrying of all, these poor children will likely grow into equally poor teenagers and adults, with dark possibilities of some of them turning towards criminality as a protest and with others perpetuating, much against their wishes, a continuing cycle of poverty. It all adds up to a grim forecast for the future. It is also a call to action, on a detailed and focused scale, about an issue that by now should have exercised minds in the national policy-making sector. The reason why policies should now be geared to children, particularly those falling prey to endemic poverty, is simple: no amount of emphasis on human resources development in the country can lead to any headway unless the health of these children living below the poverty line is addressed. Budgetary allocations, in newer perspectives of policy making, need to be made not just for a broad programme of poverty reduction but also specifically for lifting poor children out of their adverse conditions. That fundamentally means shaping strategies that will allow their families to emerge, slowly but perceptibly, out of the poverty trap. If and when that is assured, the effects on children can be quite remarkable. One can here begin thinking in terms of providing education, along with school meals, to these children. Much as we argue for children's education and much as we keep telling ourselves that immunisation for children is the way to the future, the fact is that unless we assure these children that they will have food provided to them by the state as also by organisations, not much of a difference will be there.
In other words, investments geared to the uplift of children from poor families are the great requirement in these times. Politics which ignores the future of the child is politics that eventually falls flat on its face.
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