Children and poverty
on Le Reveil du Soleil (India), 04/Apr/2009 08:20, 34 days ago
Poverty in India can be seen everywhere, what strikes me is that there is no delimitation between poor and not poor…everything goes together in one piece of scenery.It is tremendous sad and revolting but the huge number of victims are children. And the figures are shocking… more than 50% of India's total population lives below the poverty line out of each 40% are children.Just next to our residence a high number of children are living in slums. They do go to school, to a public school nearby, however they have no chance to brake the poverty cycle.. no opportunities to escape, no rights to choose their lives. They were born on the street, they live and they will die on the street. Children are first born into the experience of poverty and than they reproduce it. Children poverty and poverty in general in India is even more complex and difficult to understand because there are many complex conditions that cause poverty for generations - and most challenging being the discrimination based by caste, by religion, by age, by gender that increase the children’s inability to create change. The cast represents a community and a socio-economic status that children will be born into and they will just accept their poor destiny without learning to value their own ideas and expressions.You can often see children who live in slums and on the streets they have to work in order to help their families to survive. Obviously this means they have less time and opportunities for education or for learning basic skills. It is said that around 11 million children live on the streets and more than 44 million are child laborers. That’s huge terrifying number. It is like a hopeless situation children find themselves… they are exploited and because of socio-economic and cultural “inferiority” (due to poverty and caste) they can’t even dream for a better life and don’t ask for better…