Engage with children before making policies for them: MP Min

Madhya Pradesh minister Deepak Joshi today said policymakers should patiently listen to views of children and take inputs from them before formulating schemes for them.
"Children should be given a patient hearing. It is important and democratic to listen to children for making the schemes for them successful," he said.
The Minister of State for School and Higher Education was speaking at a function where a copy of the UNICEF's annual flagship report - State of the World's Children - was released. He also interacted with children.
During the interactive session, Joshi said, he heard the children and issues related to them patiently, and will try to address them.

The UNICEF report points out that poverty, illiteracy and early deaths await world's most disadvantaged children and said making the right choices now will reverse this fate.
It paints a dark picture of what is in store for the world's poorest children if governments, donors, businesses and international organisations do not accelerate efforts to address their needs.

The UN agency also lists the significant progress made in saving children's lives, getting them into school and lifting out of poverty.
"Global under-five mortality rates have been more than halved since 1990, boys and girls attend primary school in equal numbers in 129 countries, and the number of people living in extreme poverty worldwide is almost half of what it was in the 1990s."

But this progress has been neither even nor fair. The poorest children are twice as likely to die before their fifth birthday and to be chronically malnourished than the richest, it said.
Nirmala Buch, President, MP Child Rights Observatory, called for imparting quality education. "It is not only about infrastructure in education, we need to look into quality and learning levels of children or else we will be missing out," the former bureaucrat added.
Raghvendra Sharma, Chairman of MP State Commission for Protection of Child Rights, said, "we need to engage communities and reach out to children who are getting dropped out of schools."

Manish Mathur, Officer-in-Charge, UNICEF, Madhya Pradesh, said, "We need to specifically focus on reaching the most disadvantaged children first.