More than half of India’s children facing twin impacts of poverty and climate emergency
A report released by the international NGO, Save the Children, based on new research, states that a staggering 51 per cent of the country’s children, “are living with the dual impacts of poverty and the climate emergency”.
According to a press release by the NGO, this is the fourth worst in Asia, after Cambodia, Myanmar and Afghanistan. India’s neighbours, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka all have much less percentage of their children threatened by this “double threat”, as the report terms it, ranging from 20 to 31 per cent.
However, “India was highest ranked globally in terms of overall number of children facing this ‘double threat’ ”, said the press release. In absolute terms, the figure for India is more than 222 million, or 22.2 crore ((22,26,86,928, to be exact), with the world’s being 774 million children, approximately.
In world terms too, the data on India is very significant, in that 222 million translates to more than a quarter (approximately 29 per cent) of the children across the globe.
The report is called ‘Generation Hope: 2.4 Billion Reasons to End the Global Climate and Inequality Crisis’, and has been developed by Save the Children with climate modelling by researchers from Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) of Belgium (Vrije University, Brussels in English).
The press release quotes Sudarshan Suchi, Save the Children’s India CEO, as saying thus: “The climate emergency and issues of inequality are deeply connected, and cannot be dealt with in isolation from each other. In India, this connection could not be any more obvious. The disastrous floods we’ve seen in Assam, Kerala and cyclone-prone Odisha hit the marginalised communities the hardest, leaving thousands of people hungry and homeless. Crises like these push people even deeper into grinding poverty and leave millions of people even more vulnerable to the next flood or drought.”
