Country profile

India      New Zealand Capital New Delhi Wellington Population 1.1 billion 4.1 million Official language/s Hindi, English and 14 others English and Maori Per capita income US$720 US$27,250 NZ$1=US$0.70 NZ$983 NZ$38,928 Life expectancy 64 years 80 years Under 5 mortality rate 74/1000 5/1000 Adult literacy 61% 99% (Source: UNICEF The State of the World's Children 2008)

People
Hindi is spoken by most people, while English is important for political and commercial communication.

The caste system continues to influence society despite anti-discrimination laws. Traditionally, there were four castes plus ‘untouchables’ or ‘scheduled castes’. In reality, there are thousands of sub-castes that function as separate social groups.

Indian parents often favour boys. Although gender disparities have declined, gender-biased attitudes still result in early marriage and childbirth, lack of autonomy, low levels of literacy, poor nutrition and high maternal mortality.

History
The civilisation in the Indus valley is one of the oldest in the world. In the early 1800s, Britain took control of the area stretching from Afghanistan to Burma, ruling until 1947. With independence, the colony was partitioned into Muslim (Pakistan and Bangladesh) and Hindu (India) countries.

Geography
Stretching from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean, India’s topography and climate varies greatly. In general, the climate is hot and tropical. The coolest weather is between December and February, and the hottest April to June. Monsoon rains occur between June and September.

Very little of India's surface area is uninhabited and its high population density puts pressure on the environment through overgrazing, slash-and-burn agriculture, large-scale industrialisation, mining and indiscriminate felling of trees.

Economy
Both agriculture and industry are important to India’s economy – agriculture alone employs 60 per cent of the population. However, rural land is poorly distributed and there are large numbers of landless labourers. Slum areas in cities are spreading due to rapid urbanisation.

Many service industries, including railways, road transport and banking, are state-owned. India began to open up to foreign investment in the late 1980s. Information technology has become a specialist area, taking advantage of large numbers of well-educated, English-speaking workers with the ability to export services around the world.

Education
Before 1986, India’s national government left implementation of education policy to individual states. Although it now takes a more active role, a concerted political and social effort will be required for substantial progress to be made.

India’s long-term educational goals include 75 per cent literacy by 2005 and all children aged 6-14 years to have free, compulsory schooling by 2010. By 2005, approximately 40 per cent of the adult population remained illiterate and an estimated 35 million primary school-age children were not enrolled.

Health
As in other areas of Indian life, there is a huge disparity in access to health services. Urban slums and remote rural areas can completely lack access.

While childhood communicable diseases are becoming less common, malnutrition is a significant factor in childhood deaths and poor physical development. Vitamin A deficiency results in night blindness and a lack of iodine in the soil contributes to goitre. India has one-third of the world’s TB cases and HIV and AIDS prevalence is increasing.

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INDIA COUNTRY UPDATE

The right to education

“Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family.”
Kofi Annan, former Secretary-General of the United Nations

Education is essential, not only to a person’s development, but also to the development of their society. All children deserve to have access to a good education system, founded on gender equality and human rights. Without it, inequalities develop in society, which are often gender-based. When this happens, girls tend to receive poor education or miss out altogether.

The good news is that globally, the number of children who are not in school has declined, from 115 million in 2002 to 93 million in 2005. Statistics from UNICEF’s State of the World’s Children report show that in India, 84 per cent of primary school aged children are in school. The problem is that many girls barely make it through primary school. Often they are pulled out of school to help their parents with chores at home. At secondary school level, 63 per cent of boys are enrolled, but only 50 per cent of girls. The literacy rate amongst Indian youth (aged 15-24) shows that while 84 per cent of young men are literate, only 68 per cent of young women are so lucky.

Providing access to education for all children is a big part of what World Vision’s Area Development Programmes (ADPs) do. Sometimes it’s as simple as providing school bags, shoes or books to families who are keeping their children at home because they can’t afford the things their children need for school. World Vision deals with the bigger problems too – where there is a lack of infrastructure, the ADP can help by constructing new classrooms.

World Vision’s response varies in each community, depending what the needs are. These can include educating parents about the importance of sending their children to school; giving teachers refresher training; providing sports equipment; building playgrounds and providing bicycles for children who live far from school.

But addressing education cannot happen in isolation. All of the ADP’s activities combine to make access to education easier. For example, having a good water supply nearby makes children more likely to attend school, because they do not have to walk miles to collect water for their family. Having water to drink at school make concentrating in class easier, and the whole school becomes healthier and more productive when children are able to wash their hands.

The agricultural and small business activities World Vision assists with also make a difference to children’s access to education – if parents have a reliable, sustainable income and don’t have to migrate to find work, children are more likely to remain in school.

For children that have dropped out of school, World Vision encourages them to get back into the government school system by providing non-formal education classes, study centres and extra tuition, which help them to catch up.
In the long-term, the education they receive will help to make these children active contributors to the development of their communities.