Getting To Know Your International Contact

The country I chose to read about childhood poverty in is India.  India is home to the majority of poor people in South Asia. Between 1973 and 2000, the percentage of the population below the poverty line declined continuously from 54.9% to and estimated 26%. In health, the country is undergoing an epidemiological transition.  There continues to be high rates of communicable diseases, malnutrition, maternal and perinatal illnesses, predominantly among poor people.  There are also growing rates of non-communicable diseases, while rapid urbanization is resulting in new health problems, such as HIV/AIDS, which is placing greater strains on society and the health of the poor in particular. An estimated 400 million of the population are between 0-18 years old.  Life for many of the children is very bad. Almost half ot all the children under the age of 5 are malnutritioned and 34% of new-borns are significantly underweight. India accounts for 20% of the world's out-of-school children and has the largest number of working children in the world. Girls livig in India have limited life chances and lower rates of school enrollment.  Ecology, livelihood sources and the social structure vary substantially across Rajasthan. As elsewhere in India, caste, class, ethnicity and gender strongly affect access to resources of all kinds. Official statistics suggest that poverty has declined from 33.3 percent to 13.5 percent between 1973 and 2000, though these figures are controversial.  Rajasthan's health indicators are amongst the poorest in the country, reflecting poverty, difficult living conditions and the fact that the primary health care has not reached a large majority of poor people, especially women and children, dalits and communities living in remote areas. Educational access, enrolment and achievement remain important challenges. The problems of children from underprivileged communities i.e. scheduled (disadvantaged) castes and tribes and minorities are exacerbated by both the lack of access to and poor quality of teaching and educational facilities and the lack of effort to make schools inclusive of all children. India's anti poverty programmes are mainly run by the central government. There are three main types - rural employment creation and infrastructure development programmes; self-employment; and food subsidy programmes. All three have been subject to reform in recent years to ensure better targeting and coverage. The largest food subsidy programme is the Public Distribution System, which is explicitly targeted towards the poor. The Swaran Jayanti Swarozgar Yojana, is a self-employment programme providing subsidised loans to self help groups. Besides these there are the rural works programmes. There are two main schemes under this- the Employment Assurance scheme and the Jawahar Gram Samridhi Yojana, which. focuses on infrastructure development to be undertaken by the Gram panchayats or village local governments. All the programmes are giving a greater role to rural local government for implementation and for beneficiary selection and monitoring. The largest programme specifically targeted at children in the 0-6 age group is the Integrated Child Development Services Programme (ICDS). It is a centrally sponsored scheme covering all states. One new insight I have about poverty is that contraception never seems to be addressed. I just can't wrap my mind around living in poverty, but continue to reproduce. Why would people keeping having children when they are well aware of the fact that they can't take care of them. The government goes through all these different approaches to reduce poverty, but I feel they should be passing out birth control methods...Michael Jackson said "If you can't feed your baby, then don't have babies"......I agree!!!