Care For Children

THE plight of Nepalese children in the vortex of the violence that Nepal has experienced was highlighted by Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba in his address to a gathering in Bal Mandir on Tuesday on the occasion of the 75th auspicious birthday of Her Majesty Queen Mother Ratna Rajya Laxmi Devi Shah and 38th National Children's Day. Nepalese children in general right from their birth face tremendous odds to survive and grow physically and mentally because of poverty and ignorance, among other factors. Many children of school-going age have been deprived of education because families cannot affort to send them to school. Many of them are involved directly or indirectly in child labour. On top of these numerous challenges in an average Nepali child's life has come the completely avoidable problem of fall-out of the terrorist violence. Mr. Deuba mentioned how innocent children have fallen victims to the violence, many becoming orphans and helpless. Furthermore, this year the flooding and landslides rendered many children and their families homeless. As a special measure, Mr. Deuba informed, 5 million rupees from Prime Minister's Relief Fund and 80 million rupees to be made available within this month by USAID would be mobilised for the education, health care and rehabilitation of children who have been displaced or orphaned by violent incidents, natural calamity or in other special circumstances.

This is a welcome move. So is the government step to arrange for scholarships for Dalit children of school going age from the current fiscal year. Top priority is being given to the rehabilitation of children and the young suffering from terrorism or natural calamity and to this end private boarding schools, technical schools and centres looking after children would be mobilised. All these steps are in the right direction and are in conformity with the government's commitment to the welfare of children and UN's Convention on Children's Rights, 1990, which Nepal has endorsed. Because children are especially a vulnerable lot, the ongoing and future measures to protect their rights and promote their welfare have to be at the top of the national agenda always. Their plight must receive the full attention of the government for launching remedial measures targeted at problems ranging from those engendered by the terrorist violence to those related to child labour. For, to repeat a truism, on our children rest the future of the nation.

Bleak Picture

A SAMPLE survey jointly carried out in 30 districts covering all the ecological regions and zones by the National Planning Commission (NPC), UNICEF and New Era has presented a bleak scenario of disability cases in Nepal. According to the findings of the survey, 372,422 people in Nepal are believed to have one or another form of disability, which is 1.63 per cent of the total population. Among them the mountains house the highest number of disabled with 1.88 per cent followed by the hills with 1.64 per cent and the terai with 1.45 per cent. Similarly, the survey reveals that more disabled people live in the villages than in the urban centres. Worse is the scenario that 68.2 per cent of the disabled people lack access to education facilities even in the age of modern science and technologies and almost half of them have to look after themselves.

In fact, until recently there were not authentic data of disabled people in the country. This is the first survey of this kind on disabled people albeit the National Census 2001 had collected the data of the disabled. With the latest revelation, many facts about the physically impaired persons came into the fore. Indeed, poverty, illiteracy and lack of health facilities in the rural sectors are believed to be major causes behind the higher cases of disability in those areas. Even today, the majority of parents in the villages do not believe that their wards became impaired due to illness or other incidents. Instead, they take such cases as a curse of God and never try to take the victims to hospitals if there are any. But now with the latest finding of the survey, the government as well as the non-government organisations should prepare plans and programmes to help and educate the disabled people so that they can live independently. Efforts must be made to equip the disabled with skills by establishing rehabilitation centres, extending sign language classes in the rural areas and opening separate schools for them. At the same time awareness generating programmes should be launched in the rural sectors about the causes and effects of disability, to help these unfortunate people, who are as much a part of our society as any one of us nomal people are.