Media watch - Budgeting with a compassion deficit

Sources: various blogs, FE, Guardian, Businesswireindia, Reuters, Telegraphindia, TOI, BBC

What is the future of the street children?
Well, the government is admitting that it is in a big quandry. What is most likely to happen is that eventually this brouhaha about child beggars will die down and these children will be allowed to go - with stern warnings.

Budgeting with a compassion deficit
But nothing highlights the tokenism of the budget to equity concerns more than the statement of the Finance Minister that ‘the issue of urban poverty and unemployment is equally critical’, but the Budget increases actual allocations for employement generation in urban areas from an incredibly low Rs 250 crore to Rs 344 crore for the whole country, and continues to exclude urban homeless, migrant, and slum dwellers from the national rural health mission and the NREGS.

Hindu India Aborts Females Illegally
Some in today’s India decided to expose the abortion atrocity. They masterminded an ingenious plan to film those in the medical “profession” breaking the law by killing female unborns.

ERADICATING MALNUTRITION: AN AGENDA FOR ACTION
In the ultimate analysis, we must recognise that malnutrition is a human problem that can be addressed by human solutions, provided the requisite social will exists to bring about enduring change for the better.

India's missing girls
Daughters aren't wanted in India. So many female foetuses are illegally aborted that baby boys now hugely outnumber baby girls, while a government minister has begged parents to abandon their children rather than kill them.

The Budget and the Missing Child
CRY asks that the government make the rights of children the focus and the key evaluation criteria of economic policy. At just over 4%, state investments in children are grossly inadequate, considering that they are 45% of our citizens, or even in comparison with other emerging economies.

Poor question "Shining India" as budget eyes growth
But behind the headlines of "Shining India" are worries that growth is failing to trickle down to the poor and the communist-backed government is concerned that a by-product of the boom -- a rising inflation rate -- is making many people poorer.

SHOCKING LOW
How a society treats its children, its poor and its terminally ill is a certain measure of its level of civilization. On each of these counts, Bengal hit a new and inhuman low recently when a series of government hospitals in Calcutta refused to operate on a seriously ill child because he was found out to be HIV+.

Kids get a raw deal in budgets
A quick glance of the social sector indices reveals that despite rapid growth in GDP and per capita income, children's health and education has not received the desired attention which reflects in the high levels of foeticide, malnutrition, illiteracy and child labour rampant across the country.

March denounces child trafficking
Kailash Satyarthi, chairman of the Global March Against Child Labour, says South Asia is a major source, destination and transit area for child trafficking of all forms.