Shut Out: India’s poor, urban children

SHOCKING TRUTHS

• A child from a poor, urban family is 40% more likely to die than a richer child in India’s towns and cities.
• Children below 10 in urban areas—especially girls—are 20% more likely to be sick than children of the same age in rural areas.
• One in 10 of nearly two million homeless people in urban areas is a child, of which more than half (boys and girls) reported sexual abuse.
• More than a third of homeless children admitted to substance abuse—from glue-sniffing to hard drugs—and 96% of those who did were boys.

IndiaSpend has compiled data from various sources to evolve a picture of what it means to be a child from a poor, urban family—or without a family. Officially, a person who lives on less than Rs 47 a day is counted as poor. The picture that emerges of poor, urban children is that they are among India’s most disadvantaged people.

In many respects, they are worse off than those in rural areas, with indications that they may never be a part of what is called India’s demographic dividend—economic growth driven by 472 million below 18 years of age, the largest number of young people in the world.

Of 377 million Indians, 32% are children below 18 years of age, and more than eight million children under six years live in approximately 49,000 slums, according to the PwC report, which quotes census data. There are many more than these who live in poverty but are not counted as officially poor because they may live on more than Rs 47 per day.

Between 15 and 18 million children lived in slums, according to UNICEF, in 1992. Clearly, poor, urban children are under-counted. The 49,000 slums the report refers to are those that are officially counted and recognised, or “notified”. There are thousands more uncounted slums with unknown numbers of children. There are 13.7 million slum households, according to census 2011.

Urban children, especially those from disadvantaged sections, are susceptible to ill-health, poor access to water and sanitation, insufficient education, urban disasters and lack of protection, noted the PwC and Save Our Children report. As distress grows in rural India, still home to 833 million people, India’s urban areas are witnessing a population explosion.

The urban population added 91 million people—more than the populations of Germany or Egypt—in the decade ending in 2011 and grew 2.5 times faster than in rural areas. Of those families that are migrants, the overwhelming majority begins life on the streets, move into slums and then—if they succeed—work their way up. It is a difficult life, and those most vulnerable are children.

The mortality rate for poor children under five is 72.7 (those who die for every 1,000 born alive). That is the same as the Gambia, Laos and Haiti, three of the world’s poorest countries and higher than the urban average of 51.9 (although lower than the rural average of 82).

“More than 46% of urban poor children are underweight and almost 60% of urban poor children miss total immunisation before completing one year,” said a document in the National Urban Health Mission report. There are 1.9 million homeless people, of which 0.7 million live in urban areas, according to the 2011 census.

Of these, 10% (70,000) are aged less than 6 years. Among children who lived on the street, 52% did so because their families had migrated, followed by 14.5% who had come to the city in search of jobs and money, according to this study, conducted by Save the Children and the Department of International Development (government of UK) in the cities of Hyderabad, Kolkata, Bhubaneswar and Jaipur in 2013-14.

Most homeless children lived under a roof (46.3%)—in pipes, under tarpaulins, and flyovers, in places of worship and anything else that qualified as a roof—followed by those who lived in the open (32%). As many as 54.5% of homeless children reported sexual abuse, with 66% of boys and 67% of girls.

Substance abuse was a widespread problem. One in three children living on the streets admitted to substance abuse, according to a study conducted by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights in 2013. More than 83% these children reported a tobacco habit, followed by 68% who drank alcohol and 36% who smoked cannabis, said the report, carried out in 27 states and two union territories across 135 sites in cities and towns, with 4,024 respondents.

Of the children reporting substance abuse, 95.8% were boys and 4.2% were girls; 69.8% of the respondents lived in urban spaces. A majority of the children (58.8%) were out of school, 28% were in formal schools and 12.9% were in open schools. (The writers are policy analysts at IndiaSpend)

By Prachi Salve & Saumya Tewari