UN's goals for children grim in India

With 17 per cent of the global deaths of children under five projected to take place in India, the country is one of the leading factors endangering the Sustainable Development Goal targets of 2030 said a recently released UNICEF report. The State of the World's Children Report 2016 put India among the five countries that will account for more than half of the under five deaths. Among the rest Nigeria will bear 15 per cent, Pakistan 8 per cent, the Democratic Republic of the Congo 7 per cent and Angola 5 per cent.

The SDG for under five mortality is 25 deaths per 1000 live births.

If the world continues on its current track of inequality and malnutrition, it will see dire consequences in 2030 instead of the outcomes of the SDGs; 167 million children will live in extreme poverty, 69 million children under the age of five will die between 2016 and 2030, 60 million children of primary school age will be out of school. "Pneumonia will remain the second biggest killer of children under age 5, and preterm birth complications will remain the first" says the report.

A glaring reason for such a dire situation was the widening gap between status of children of the rich and of the poor. The poorest children are 1.9 times likelier to die before the age of five than the richest children. Though economic growth a country does alleviate the burden of under five deaths, India as country "in the fast lane for global economic growth" has been slow about reducing child mortality. Here, children born into the poorest 20 per cent are almost thrice as likely to die during their first five years as those from the richest 20 per cent, while they're twice as likely in Bangladesh.

India is also off track to achieve the neo-natal mortality target of 12 deaths per 1000 live births, needing "accelerated progress" to achieve the desired rate of reduction, which is double its current rate.

This poverty also deeply impacts the learning outcomes and access to education of the surviving children. As a marker of each child's level of learning, the report says that in India there is a 19 per cent gap in the ability to subtract between the rich and the poor children. It calls this a "learning penalty". This continues through schooling, placoing poor children at a progressive disadvantage. The report says, "In India's rural schools, a 2014 study showed that just under half of children in fifth grade were able to read a basic second-grade text. In arithmetic, half of fifth graders could not subtract two-digit numbers, and only about one quarter could do basic division."