Reiterated Commitment

PRIME Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba, while addressing the 27th Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly on Children in New York the other day reiterated the government’s commitment to child rights. Mentioning Nepal as one of the first signatories of the two protocols of the Child Right Convention, Prime Minister Deuba said that Nepal was committed to do everything in its power to promote child development and to protect child rights. Undoubtedly, children are the future of any country. In the absence of proper development of the children, the future of a country is uncertain. Realising this very fact each country has given top priority to children’s welfare programmes. Nepal, too, has introduced several laws and programmes aimed at the betterment of children. Adoption of the Children Act and other relevant laws to ensure child welfare and the establishment of a separate Ministry to look into the issues of women and children speak the seriousness of the government regarding the development of children. Likewise, concerted efforts at the regional level in enhancing child welfare, preventing child trafficking and declaring the decade for the rights of the child are also highly commendable.

However, the efforts made so far for the welfare of the children seem to be inadequate. Still a large number of children especially in the rural area lack access to their basic rights – schools, health services, clean drinking water and a congenial atmosphere for their physical and mental development. Though there are schools in each village and provisions for free education, poverty-stricken parents are unable to send their wards to schools. A larger number of the school-age children are compelled to work as labourers for their livelihhood. There are laws prohibiting children from hard manual jobs, but the laws are not implemented effectively. Trafficking of children, especially the girl-child, has been another big problem in the country. Hundreds of girl-children fall victim to trafficking every year. Moreover, the Maoists terrorists have violated the children’s basic rights by forcing them to carry weapons and involve them in their terrorist activities. Thus, Prime Minister Deuba rightly mentioned the problems faced by Nepalese children at the world forum and the programmes introduced for their welfare to draw the attention of the world leaders towards the plights of the Nepalese children. For a resource-crunch country like Nepal, a complete elimination of the problems of the children on its own is very challenging. What it needs is the sincere cooperation from the international communities, NGOs and the civil society and above all the effective implementation of all the programmes, to ensure a better future for the children of this country.

Students San Textbooks

STUDENTS in the hilly areas of the Far-Western Development Region are said to be facing shortage of textbooks and that the scarcity is hampering teaching and learning activities there. This is not the very first time that students of certain districts, especially in the hilly and mountainous regions, have been confronting this problem. In fact, come every academic year, then it would not be a surprise to hear of students and teachers of some schools in the hilly and mountainous areas bitterly complaining of shortage of textbooks. And what is more disheartening to note is that even when the academic session has progressed into its first-quarter, some students are still left wondering as to when they would be to receiving their textbooks. This, in turn, goes on to play havoc with the schools’ entire academic calendar and activities. The more so in meeting the examination schedules—which, needless to point out, are set by the concerned education authorities. In other words, if the teachers of schools hit by textbook scarcity are forced to come up with ways and means to continue teaching the students so as to complete the academic calendar charted out by the concerned authorities within a given time-frame, then the same students are invariably left to fend for themselves as far as preparing for their stipulated examinations is concerned. Small wonder that students studying in schools in the hilly and mountainous areas, compared with their counterparts in urban centres, are said to be performing poorly in their examinations. Since the performances of students in their yearly examinations are the standard—and sole—criteria in gaining admissions to institutes of higher learning later on, it hardly needs any stretch of imagination on the part of all to fathom the problems and challenges that students from hilly and mountainous regions have to face in gaining entry in campuses of their first choices. Herein, it hardly needs an reiteration that a sizable portion of the nation’s meagre resources is allocated to the education sector every year. Nor, for that matter, the government’s endeavour and investments to impart quality education to all the nation’s students. Hence, if the nation’s investments are to be put to beneficial use and the government’s laudable objective is to materialise, then it looks to reason on the part of the concerned authorities come up with practical schemes to make available textbooks to all the students way before their academic sessions start.