The past one decade has been a decade of undeclared war on women, adolescents and children as poverty, conflict, chronic social instability and the preventable diseases such as HIV/AIDS threaten their human rights and sabotage their development.''In the last State of the World's Children (SOWC) report of this millennium, which was globally launched today in Berlin, New Delhi and other capitals of the world, the UNICEF analysed and highlighted the increasing discrimination against the girl child and reprimanded the countries for failing in their responsibility towards the children.``Although discrimination against girls and women is found on every continent of the worlds, the sheer scale of its population and cultural strictures against the gender and class, few regions compare with South Asia, where every year millions of girls are born into poverty, debt servitude and dehumanising birth cases,'' the SOWC report said adding, ``Poor pregnant women worry about the future dowry costs of a daughter,increasingly seek the services of travelling `sonogram doctors' and female foeticide has been reported in 27 of India's 32 states. In some communities of Bihar and Rajasthan, birth ratios, naturally expected to be 100 females for every 103 males are dramatically lower at 60 females for every 100 males.''Besides the male dependence and illiteracy, the report highlights the caste poverty in the region. ``Caste poverty persists throughout the vast region, defying the laws that prohibit its practice and stripping well over 160 million people in India alone of their rights. ``A particularly cruel burden falls on the children as parents take out meagre loans in exchange for consigning or selling a child to a factory or a plantation owner. An estimated 20 million, and perhaps as many as 40 million, girls and boys in South Asia toil in this debt servitude, hunched over looms, making bricks, or rolling cigarettes by hand countless others spend their childhood and adolescence in domestic servitude, sweeping floorsand scrubbing pots and pans.``It is disturbing to imagine what awaits a child of six when his parents place him in debt bondage in exchange for a loan for seed or shelter. It is almost unfathomable to think of a girl from the Nepalese mountains who sold by her impoverished parents to an agent offering employment in a carpet factory, instead finds herself in a windowless room in Calcutta or Mumbai with other girls forced to have sex with as many as two dozen adult clients a day.''However, while making the presentation of the report, Alan Court, the UNICEF representative in India, observed that the report does count India as one of the many countries that have begun the task of building a society around the best interests of the children. Making references to the report, Court said that of more than 450 million children immunised against polio in 1998, India alone vaccinated 134 million children during national immunisation days. On the health front, the report expressed grave concern over the rising caseof AIDS in the world.``Each day 8,500 children and young people around the world are infected with the HIV and 2,500 women die from AIDS. In 1998 alone the number of women killed by HIV/AIDS was 900,000 more than three times the death toll of the war in Bosnia,'' says the report. Drawing parallels between the havoc created by the virus and the destruction caused by war, it said that, the social and economic devastation caused by the HIV/AIDS in the last decade is greater than the combined destruction of the continent's wars. An estimated 200,000 Africans, most of them women and children, died as a result of conflicts in 1998 while 2 million people were killed by AIDS, the report added. And pointing to the spread of the catastrophic combination of stigma, taboo and silence that plagues the sub-Saharan Africa to the South Asia, the report says: ``Since HIV/AIDS appeared in the South Asia in 1986, more than five million people in the region have been infected with the virus, about half of them women. Theretoo the social powerlessness of women means large numbers are being infected by the HIV by their husbands. In a study of nearly 400 women attending clinics in the Indian city of Pune, nearly one fourth had a sexually transmitted infection, although 91 per cent said they had only had sex with their husbands; 13.6 per cent tested positive for HIV.''One of the most outrageous dangers to the children in South Asia is their invisibility in HIV/AIDS pandemic, it added.The date provided by the report also indicated that the maternal mortality ratio in India is 410 per 100,000 live births. Malnutrition accounts for over 50 per cent children below five years being under weight, 18 per cent suffer wasting and 52 per cent stunting, it said. For its agenda in the next century, the report particularly asked for the shift of focus towards early childhood care, quality education and focus on adolescents.
