Adolescents left out of Census

Chennai:
Children in India between 14-18 years are invisible population, who are not accounted for in census, according to a study Understanding Adolescent Poverty in Tamil Nadu.

Addressing a press conference after the release of the report Little’s Trust – A Centre for Children, Madurai trustee T R Parvatha Varthini, whose trust prepared the report with the help of Samakalvi Iyakkam, Tamil Nadu and Child Relief and You (CRY), said that this population is experiencing socio, cultural, economical and legal poverty because of lack of political will to pay due attention by the policy makers and society at large.

Interestingly, the state directorate of Census operations don’t have any data on adolescent for 2011 census while it does have the data of adolescent in the 2001 census, says Varthini while highlighting the information received from Right To Information data in August 2013.

She said the focus on children between 14-18 is guided by the fact that there are legislations protecting children up to 14 years such as the Right to Education Act (RTE Act) which guarantees children aged 6-14 with eight years of elementary education; the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act (CLPRA) which focuses on children upto 14 years of age and prohibits and regulates employment in certain specified hazardous occupations.

Surprisingly, no such guarantees exist for children in 14-18 years of age group who live in precarious conditions due to depravation of education, early marriage, unwanted pregnancy, childbearing and rearing, untimely entry into the labour force and exploitation at home and at workplace.

The report, which would be submitted to the state government as well as labour and education departments, covers 25 districts in Tamil Nadu with 2,436 respondents that include adolescent children drawn from all sections of the society representing all regional, class, gender and caste equations with stratified random sampling and exploratory research design.

The report also stressed the need for status report on adolescent children besides taking effort to define the age of children as 18 years.

The report also recommended that as per the guidelines of national Policy for Children 2013, child rights protection committees at all district level has to be established with time bound commitment to the state and entrusted with required budgetary provision for the activation of such committees.