Children living in urban India are equally vulnerable to poverty as their rural counterparts. A new Indian specific statistics presented at the launch of the Unicef’s flagship publication,Children in an Urban World, shows that the child poverty indicators are equally worse in the cases of both the rural and the urban poor populations.
After the launch of the Unicef report that highlights the state of the world’s children, Unicef India representative Karin Hulshof asserted the need to put children at the heart of urban planning.
She also said that the Unicef is gearing up to focus on urban policies for children in the next country programme of cooperation with the government of India. The new statistics specifies the indicators for the urban poor as against the urban and the rural populations.
It shows that the percentage of underweight children (below 5 years) is 47 per cent for the urban poor against 46 per cent for the rural and 33 percent for the urban population. In the case of sanitation and hygiene, the statistics says that open defecation among the urban poor is equally prevalent as among the rural households.
While anaemia is found among 72 per cent of the rural children, 71 per cent among the urban poor children also suffer from it. The infant mortality rate is 62 per cent for the rural and 55 per cent for the urban poor. The child marriage is 48 per cent for both the rural and the urban poor, the report says. The number of women unable to access safe delivery is higher in the case of the urban poor (53 per cent) than the rural population.
Also, the women among the urban poor are more vulnerable to anaemia (59 per cent) than their rural counterparts (57 per cent). Ms Hulshof pointed out that India is expected to have 40 per cent of its population living in urban areas by 2026.
She said that the country needed to put children at the heart of urban planning and to extend and improve services for all in the urban areas.