Convention on the rights of the child : the alternate report

This is the Alternate Report on the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (hereafter CRC) in India. It is usual for governments to make tall claims of their achievements and to cover up the shortfalls in implementation and realisation of objectives. The provision for submission of Alternate Reports by interested parties offers the scope that facts are carefully sifted, claims made by the governments are questioned, and an attempt is made to bring out realities on the ground. Using the opportunity afforded by this provision, Butterflies undertook the ation of this Alternate Report for India. It gives us great pleassure to offer this report for preparation consideration by the Child's Rights Committee.

Chil Butterflies is a grass-roots organisation working with street children. Apart from having service delivery programmes for street children, the organisation also attaches importance to documentation, research and advocacy as an integral part of its work. In the process of its work Butterflies conceived the idea of preparing a report on the status of Indian children. Being aware that situation analysis reports on children generally base their conclusions on aggregates and averages across the country, our report was to look at disaggregated data and focus on the situations and conditions of deprived and vulnerable children particularly from socially and culturally marginalised communities.

We worked on this idea, developed a proposal and presented it to funding agencies likely to support our endeavour. The response was lukewarm. None of them thought it important enough to commit money to such an endeavour. Perhaps the time was not ripe-1992 was not the year of child's rights. However, this situation changed once the Government of India ratified the CRC and, as per the statutory requirement, was to submit its report to the Committee on Child's Rights. As a result, a lot of interest was generated about the CRC. UNICEF sponsored a number of workshops on the CRC during 1993 and 1994. Simultaneously, child labour and universalisation of primary education came up as the two most popular issues for debate and discussion. For us at Butterflies, this was the opportune moment to rewrite our proposal with the CRC as the main focus, and realise our original objective.

This time round the funding agencies were inclined to be more forthcoming. This required that Butterflies decide whether the report they produced would be an entirely in-house affair or would involve wider participation. We held a series of meetings with different persons-academics, trade unionists, human rights and women activists, advocates-who had been a source of inspiration, guidance and support for Butterflies over the years. All of them endorsed the need for a benchmark study on children that would reflect the real face of the Indian child and advised that the exercise be broad-based involving people from outside the organisation. Accordingly, Butterflies decided to set up a group that represented diverse disciplines and experiences but was united by a common concern about the situation of children in the country.