In a first-of-its-kind event in India’s most populous state, a child parliament was convened on December 17-18 by the Uttar Pradesh State Commission for Protection of Child Rights (UPSCPCR). It was attended by 160 students (58 girls and 102 boys) aged between 12-18 years from 22 districts statewide. The Children’s Parliament received top level attention with chief minister Akhilesh Yadav, the speaker of the legislative assembly Mata Prasad Pandey and urban development minister Azam Khan among others in attendance.

The child delegates from 36 government and private schools were nominated by district magistrates across the state. To qualify for participation, the nominated child delegates were asked to write a general knowledge test administered by school managements on behalf of the UPSCPCR. The selected 160 were then allotted themes under the broader framework of the United Nations’ newly-adopted 17 sustainable development goals and requested to pen down questions which were first approved by members of UPSCPCR and then narrowed down for presentation to Akhilesh Yadav accompanied by his wife Dimple, who is a Samajwadi Party MP representing Kannauj. Clearly the children/youth were well chosen because they posed intelligent questions. For instance, Anshumant Dinesh from Noida asked why malnutrition is not an important issue in a state where 37 percent of children suffer it.

Yasmeen from Varanasi criticised the state government’s much publicised 1090 Women’s Powerline initiative under which a specially constituted police call centre deals with complaints of sexual harassment. She said she had been so harassed by some village boys that she had stopped attending school, and complaints to 1090 had yielded no result.

Likewise, Sandhya Singh from Barabanki wanted to know why the state, which is well on its way to hitting the mark of 10 million unemployed youth by 2017, is diffident about providing career counselling to children in government schools while Mohammed Yunus from Aligarh wanted the government to rethink its definition of development.

In Uttar Pradesh, which is notoriously hostile to children — 380,000 infants die before age five every year and because of widely practised female foeticide, the ratio of girls to male children is 902:1,000, and 22,223 schools function with just one single teacher and 2.8 million child marriages are performed annually — these are very relevant questions.

To his credit and to the surprise of the public, UP’s youthful (41) chief minister Akhilesh Yadav listened carefully to delegates of the Children’s Parliament and promised to give their grievances due consideration. On the issue of poor learning outcomes in government primaries for instance, he said that 168,219 para-teachers would be given audio-visual aids to improve teaching while the challenge of career counselling would be tackled by setting up telephone helplines.

Juhie Singh, the chairperson of UPSCPCR, believes that the Children’s Parliament was a useful exercise as it has resulted in “concrete announcements”. For instance letters were sent by the chief minister to all MLAs, newly elected panchayat leaders, anganwadi workers and auxillary nurses and midwives to urgently address the issue of child malnutrition, she says.

The Children’s Parliament was also a revelation to students in Lucknow who served as volunteers to get the show going. Comments Anurag Bhaskar, a law student of the Ram Manohar Lohia National Law University: “The issues debated in the two-day parliament and questions posed to the chief minister were an indication of how well teenagers in the state are aware of the problems adversely affecting education, and possible solutions.”

On the other hand the chief minister and his lieutenants in the country’s most backward state, where the annual outlay for education is a mere 1.5 percent of the state’s GDP, had little more to offer than homilies such as “work hard and don’t look for short cuts” and “don’t expect too much too soon”. As if 65 years after India was declared a high aspirational Republic, is a short time.

Puja Awasthi (Lucknow)