In India, Children's Day is observed to pay tributes to the First Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru (fondly called Chacha Nehru) on his birth anniversary and enhance awareness of the rights, care and education of children in the country. However, the International Children's Day is observed on November 20.
UN has come out with Millennium Development Goals in which child development and education is an issue. Here is my special write up on the observance which had earlier published in a news portal which has been closed now.
In September 2000, the world leaders representing 189 countries adopted the United Nations Millennium Declaration, calling for stronger global efforts to reduce poverty, improve health, and promote peace, human rights and environmental sustainability.
The UN Secretary-General at the behest of the UN General Assembly prepared a road map for achieving the commitments made in the Declaration-resulting in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The Goals reflect key aims of various UN development conferences in the 1990s.
They also built on the International Development Goals created by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 1996. The Millennium Development Goals include all but one of the OECD International Development Goals. The Goals are now widely accepted as a framework for measuring development progress. Bilateral and multilateral funding institutions and various public-private partnership initiatives have made the MDGs a central focus of their development assistance.
Though the Millennium Development Goals are for all humankind, they are primarily about children. The reasons being: Because six of the eight goals relate directly to children: meeting the last two goals will also make critical improvements in their lives.
...Because meeting the Goals is most critical for children: Children are most vulnerable when people lack essentials like food, water, sanitation and health care. They are the first to die when basic needs are not met.
...Because children have rights: Each child is born with the right to survival, food and nutrition, health and shelter, an education, and to participation, equality and protection – rights agreed to, among others, in the 1989 international human rights treaty the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Convention has been ratified by 192 states, every country in the world except two. The Millennium Development Goals must be met for these basic human rights to be realized.
...Because reducing poverty starts with children: Helping children reach their full potential is also investing in the very progress of humanity. For it is in the crucial first years that interventions make the biggest difference in a child’s physical, intellectual and emotional development. And investing in children means achieving development goals faster, as children constitute a large percentage of the world’s poor.
The MDG-Goal Two is pertaining to the achievement of universal primary education: This goal calls for universal primary education by 2015 children everywhere, boys and girls alike, to be able to complete a full course of primary schooling. The suggested indicators are net enrollment ratio in primary education, proportion of pupils starting grade 1 who reach grade 5, and literacy rate of 15-24 years old.
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