Childhood care, a fundamental right

Despite an SC ruling, the paucity of angan-wadis in urban areas is exemplified by the situation in Bengaluru.

Recent news items reported that: a lintel under construction at a construction site collapsed and killed two labourers’ children sleeping at the spot; a cement lorry ran over a toddler playing there while its parents were busy working at the construction site; and, hold your breath, a road-roller ran over and flattened two toddlers who were made to sleep by the road-side while their mother was busy working to lay the road.

These are everyday trivial irritations, it seems, for which the city has no patience or time, as it has more important and bigger dreams to worry about and achieve.  For instance, the urgent need to construct: a steel fly-over for Rs 1,350 crore for a 7 km stretch to the airport for a few thousand go-getters going to the airport; elevated signal-free corridors for private vehicles to zoom over at a cost of Rs 20,000 crore.

These macho concerns leave no time for the patriarchal rulers to see or care about the woman construction labourer climbing up make-shift stairs with a baby at the waist and a basin full of bricks on her head; or the lakhs of other informal sector women workers struggling to meet the need to both look after their children and earn a livelihood.

The above incidents point to the utter lack of day-care facilities for young children. As a result, children in India, the “most important assets of the nation,” so characterised by none other than the Supreme Court, suffer the ignominy of being among the most stunted, underweight and malnourished children in the world. 

Several laws require employers to provide crèche facilities, but these are limited in their application. The Factories Act requires a crèche to be provided when more than 30 women workers work in the establishment; under the Inter-State Migrant Workmen’s Act and the Contract Labour (R&A) Central Rules, the number is 20 or more; and under the Construction Workers’ Act, it is 50 or more.  
There is no succour for women working in establishments where less than these prescribed numbers are working.  A directive of the Karnataka High Court, in a suo motu PIL on out-of-school children, asked the Karnataka Labour Department to fill this lacuna by issuing a circular making it mandatory for all employers/ contractors to ferry the 3-6 year-olds at their work-sites to the nearest anganwadi whenever the law does not require them to provide a crèche themselves. The Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) gives a modicum of care, but not full day-care, to children below six as it is run only between  9 am and 4 pm. 

A Supreme Court ruling in the Right to Food case calls for the universalisation of the ICDS and provision of an anganwadi for every 1,000 population or whenever a community with 40 children under six years demands one. Despite this ruling, the paucity of anganwadis especially in urban areas is exemplified by the situation in Bengaluru. There were only 2,137 anganwadis, as of March 2015, to cater to the 10,52,837 children under six.

Even if only 40% of these children are considered to require an anganwadi, the number needed by them is 10,528, leaving a gap of 8,391 anganwadis in the city alone. In Karnataka, 32% of children are 0-6 years.  But they have received only 9% of the children’s budget and the expenditure per child is only Rs. 2,000, as per a study by the Centre for Budget & Policy Studies.

Lop-sided priorities
A means by which the children of construction workers can be provided with day-care is by utilising some of the Rs 3,500 crore, collected as cess from builders, to build at least one day-care centre per ward in all urban areas.

This is possible as the Construction Workers’ Welfare Act allows the Board to provide grants to local authorities to provide welfare facilities for workers and their families. These could also serve as common facilities for all working women in a ward under certain stipulations.

But, shockingly, instead of using the fund for such a genuine development priority, the Board has earmarked almost Rs 300 crore just to build kalyana mantaps for construction workers in every district of Karnataka.  

Coming to the aid of women and setting right the priorities of our patriarchal rulers is the 259th Report of the Law Commission. The Commission feels that time has come to make Early Childhood Care and Development a legal entitlement by bringing three Constitutional amendments: a new Article 24A as an enforceable Fundamental Right to ensure the child’s right to basic care and assistance; an amendment to Article 21A to provide 3-6 year-olds also a Fundamental Right to Education; and an amendment to Article 51A(k) to make it a fundamental duty of the parent/guardian to provide education to 3-6 year-olds also.

Hopefully, the miasmic slogans enveloping the country currently, such as “Sabka saath, sabka vikas” will include children and their development also in their ambit, given that the global Sustainable Development Goals prioritise the development of children as the true indicators of a country’s development.

(The writer is Executive Trustee of CIVIC, Bengaluru)