Getting to Know Your International Contacts
My connection to a professional in another country
has not yet been established so I decided to investigate was childhood poverty
in India is like; and what I found out was quite disturbing. While
India’s economy has certainly been growing lately and more wealth is going into
and being generated by this country, children in India are still in much need
of assistance. More than 50% of India’s total population lives below the
poverty line, and more than 40% of this population are children. With the
growth in the economy, child labor has become an increasing problem here as
poverty-stricken homes are attempting to survive by sending their young
children to work. It was reported by researchers that often times children as
young as six years old are sent to work, a large percentage of Indian children
in certain rural areas drop out of school before finishing the seventh grade. It’s
believed that the main reasons for this stem from India’s social structure
where children are taught to accept the conditions which tend to produce
poverty which in turn tends to perpetuate those conditions and keep them in
place for generations upon generations. When children are born into poverty
they tend to remain there and become accustomed to the lifestyle that produces
it before they are old enough to make a change for themselves.
In India, many children live in slums and on the
streets and child laborers and construction workers are all too common. Over
50,000 children are abandoned by their families for various reasons in this
country every year. Eleven million children live on the streets of India and
there are more than 44 million child laborers in the country.
Indian families place a large amount of emphasis on
their religious and cultural tradition and children are taught to accept the
cultural values of their ancestors. As a side effect of this type of acceptance
to tradition, children living in poverty stricken families are less likely to
make attempts to change their traditions, even ones of poverty, as they age is
believed that certain types of discrimination in
India are another origin of poverty amongst children. There is a very clear
distinction between the traditional socialization of Indian boys and Indian
girls as parents teach their daughters to be passive, dependent, and
subservient so that they will grow up to be obedient wives. Indian parents
prepare their young boys to be independent caretakers and providers for their
future family. Because of this, young women born into impoverished homes are
unlikely to be willing to take steps necessary through education or work to
break this cycle.
Indian children are also victims of discrimination
based on their caste. Their caste is a community and socio-economic status that
they are born into and are taught to accept. Indian children, especially those
in minority groups, are taught to not value their own aspirations and goals,
but rather to accept their social status and fate. The suppression of women,
children, and members of the lower class in India limits the amount of Indians
who may contribute to the growth of the nation and thus perpetuates cycles of
poverty that so many children are victims of.
While there have been some advances in poverty
levels amongst children and some take steps to protect this vulnerable class,
child poverty in India is still a serious problem that must be addressed.
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