One in every three malnourished children in the world lives in India. In a nation with soaring Gross Domestic Product rates and stock market indices, children continue to die of malnutrition and starvation.

According to a UNICEF report, India has the highest number of undernourished children in the world at 57 million. India has the same rate of malnutrition as Ethiopia with 47 per cent of its children undernourished. Nearly 2.1 million children die of malnutrition every year in this country.

The major cause for such a tragedy is the lack of public health services in remote regions, poor access to subsidised health care facilities, the declining state expenditure on public health and the lack of awareness on preventive child health care.

Anaemia affects the vast majority of pregnant women and teenage girls, stunts children’s growth and is a leading cause of maternal death and babies with low birth weight in India. Similarly, diarrhoea, often caused by unsafe drinking water or poor sanitation, is the second leading cause of death among children.

The Indian constitution supports the right of universal education until age 14 and has had a long-standing goal of free and compulsory education for all children between the ages of six and 14. However, India has not been able to achieve this goal.

The Indian educational system is the second largest in the World after China. In 2001-02, there were nearly 0.66 million primary schools in India. However, despite the strong constitutional backing for the provision of primary education in India and its expansion over time, the system is characterized by low achievements.

Huge gaps remain between rural and urban areas, and the probability of getting any education at all sharply depends on gender, caste and income. Of the 200 million children in the age group 6-14, it is estimated that 59 million are out of school. Of these, 35 million are girls and 24 million are boys.

The education infrastructure are quite poor even as the government is the largest provider of education in India with only about 10% of primary schools owned by the private sector. The quality of education provided by the public education system is low, too. Moreover, there is a lot of ‘waste’ in the educational system with dropout rates as high as 40% for the country as a whole and in some Indian states they are as high as 75%.

Though the number of primary schools in the country increased, more than 100,000 habitations still do not have access to a primary school within a distance of one kilometer. Teacher-pupil ratios are inadequate: less than 2 teachers are available in rural areas to teach a class size of around 100 students.

Poverty is another issue which complication the issue, with more than 250 million people in India living on less than a $1 a day. Although education is provided ‘free’ by the government, the cost of uniforms, textbooks and transportation costs are beyond the reach of many households.

Coupled with poverty, the poor do not have the opportunity to send their children to school, as they consider them to be breadwinners from a very early age. Child labour is widely prevalent, with many children forced to work in order to supplement a meager family income and therefore do not attend school.