Thursday 10 February 2011

‘Please, sir, I want some more’

The term Dickensian refers to poor social and economic conditions as reflected in the novels of Charles Dickens. The Industrial Revolution had brought about major changes in 19th century England. Wealth grew, but so did poverty and hunger. Fashionable areas grew up, but so did debtors’ prisons and workhouses.
There is no striking picture of the Dickensian world than that of the half-starved Oliver Twist with his bowl saying, ‘Please, sir, I want some more.’ Strangely, this holds good in an “increasingly populous, urbanised and environmentally challenged” 21st century world.
Even as I write this, 17 children have reportedly died of malnutrition in nine months in Mumbai. It is said that 55 per cent of the city’s population live in slums side by side with some of the wealthiest people in India.
Hunger is an unwelcome guest in many more homes in India. In 2008, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), which brings out the Global Hunger Index (GHI), constructed the India State Hunger Index (ISHI) after analysing hunger levels in 17 major states covering more than 95 per cent of the population.
The results were shocking: Not a single state fell in the ‘low hunger’ or ‘moderate hunger’ categories. One state—Madhya Pradesh—fell in the ‘extremely alarming’ category.
Well, that sticks out like a sore thumb in the great India story since 1991 when GDP has doubled. In the race ahead, one report says, India seems certain to miss one of its key Millennium Development Goals: halving malnutrition by 2015.
There are other ways too in which children’s lives are wrecked. Six-year-old Parthiban is the son of the watchman in our apartment. Till a few years ago, his father, who worked in a ration shop, lived in a one-room shack. But when the rent became unaffordable, he opted to moonlight as a watchman so that his wife and son will at least have a roof over their heads; Parthiban sleeps, eats and does his homework in the common area between our flats and stairwells.
But Mohammad Manan Ansari, now 15, of Samsahiriya village in Jharkhand, could not even think of that. He began working in a mica mine at the age of eight. Thanks to the Bachpan Bachao Andolan, he is at a rehabilitation centre in Jaipur to study.
India is said to have the largest number of child labourers who are under 14 in the world. The ostensible reason is always poverty, but there are other factors such as parents’ attitudes, discrimination, and social exclusion which are responsible for child labour
Last year, Ansari narrated his story at the International Labour Organisation on the day dedicated to the fight against child labour. He has a new mission in life now: to defend children’s rights.
In 1989, the Convention on the Rights of the Child became the first legally binding international convention to affirm human rights for children. While great progress has been made on child rights in the past 20 years, a UNICEF report says “many of the world’s children will never see the inside of a school room, and millions lack protection against violence, abuse, exploitation, discrimination and neglect”.
The most vulnerable among them are girls. In many places they don’t even get essential healthcare.
Tess of the d’Urbervilles (in a novel by the same name) is the face of a young woman who learns at a very tender age that the world she lives in is a blighted one. The novel’s setting is the impoverished rural Wessex during the Long Depression. It begins with Parson Tringham informing John Durbeyfield, a peasant, that he has noble lineage. He says “Durbeyfield” is a corruption of a great family name, “D’Urberville”. To the inebriated man, the piece of information was another intoxicant. (All of us, Saint Thomas Christians, will understand easily how heady lineage can be!)
Now it comes on the shoulders of Tess, 14, his eldest daughter, to take the goods loaded in a cart to the market the next day. Little Abraham, her brother, accompanies her.
The sun had not yet risen when the children set out on their journey, Abraham still groggy. …As he began to wake up slowly, Abraham, as little children would, got fascinated with silhouettes made against the sky by trees and clouds, “began to talk of the strange shapes assumed by the various dark objects against the sky; of this tree that looked like a raging tiger springing from a lair; of that which resembled a giant’s head”.
Suddenly, he stopped to ask his sister:
“Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?”
“Yes.”
“All like ours?”
“I don’t know; but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound—a few blighted.”
“Which do we live on—a splendid one or a blighted one?”
“A blighted one.”

There is another story from long ago, when a young woman and her husband, looking for a place to rest, knocked at the doors of several inns. They had no money, and were exhausted and cold, and she was pregnant. Later that day, she gave birth to a baby boy in a manger.
Time had some more bad surprises in store for the family. The parents had to flee to another country to escape the wrath of the king.
There are many reasons why people choose to migrate, including poverty, armed conflict, social strife, political turmoil and economic hardships. All such migration destroys human dignity, worst of all of children.
It is our collective responsibility to ensure every child’s rights to survival, development, protection and participation. In Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral’s words: “We are guilty of many errors and many faults but our worst crime is abandoning the children, neglecting the fountain of life. Many of the things we need can wait. The child cannot. Right now is the time his bones are being formed, his blood is being made, and his senses are being developed. To him we cannot answer ‘Tomorrow.’
“His name is ‘Today.’”