In 1957 Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister, designated November 14 — his birthday — as Children’s Day, because he wanted to “create an atmosphere in the country where the attention is constantly focused on children and their welfare”. Yet in this editorial written on Children’s Day 55 years later, it is the lamentable duty of your editor to report that Nehru’s implicit commitment that the State would accord highest priority to the happiness and well-being of the world’s largest child and youth population has been practised more in the breach than observance.

On October 15, two well-respected international voluntary organisations published the Global Hunger Index (GHI) 2022 which ranks India #107 among 121 countries in the “serious” hunger category. According to the report, India fares poorly on all four parameters of the index — mass undernourishment, child stunting, child wasting and child mortality, a combi[1]nation of factors signalling a “multidimensional nature of hunger”.

GHI 2022 estimates that 16.3 percent of the country’s population is undernourished, 35.5 percent children are stunted, under-five child mortality is 3.3 percent and children suffering wasting, i.e, disproportionate body weight to height at 19 percent, is highest worldwide.

Chronic hunger — a consequence of food distribution inefficiencies rather than deficient agri and horticulture production — apart, pathetic shelter and living conditions of 21st century India’s children is a much glossed over subject. The built-up area of the average Indian home is a mere 504 sq. ft, leaving children very little room for undisturbed study and growth. Moreover it’s well-documented (especially in EducationWorld) that the quality of education that 260 million in-school children receive is rock-bottom.

Year after year the authoritative Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) of the independent Pratham Education Foundation has highlighted that primary education learning outcomes in rural India — especially in government schools — are going from bad to worse. Continuous exhortations of this publication to the Central and state governments to increase their combined annual budgetary outlay for public education to 6 percent of GDP as first recommended by the Kothari Commission in 1967, have proved infructuous.

The plain truth is that the Indian establishment is afflicted with astonishing astigmatism about the importance of public education. Leaders of establishment constituencies are indifferent to the abysmal quality of education that 150 million underclass children receive in public/government schools. It’s these young hopefuls who will become government employees, shopfloor workers in industry and agri-producers of tomorrow. Their low productivity will ensure that high potential India will remain an also-ran country well into the 22nd century.

It’s high time that the establishment and middle class woke up to the harsh reality that India will never transform into a respected middle class nation until and unless we cut all children a better deal.