An Overview
SANKALP has been working towards promotion of the basic rights to life, survival and development of children. The thrust has been to give every child a better future or a world fit for children for their fullest physical, psychological, spiritual, social, cognitive and cultural development.

The Organisation has been implementing the goals, strategies and actions outlined in various United Nation summits and conferences and international legal standards for child protection for the child development; with appropriate adaptations to the specific situations of India as well as the diverse circumstances in different parts of the country. These international declarations and instruments include;

• Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) (1979);
• Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) (1989) (including the two optional protocols: one on the sale of children, child prostitution, and child pornography, and the other on children in armed conflict);
• World Summit on Children/World Declaration on the Survival, Protection and Development of Children/Plan of Action (1990);
• World Conference on Education for All, Jomtien, Thailand (1990);
• Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action from the World Conference on Human Rights (1993);
• Programme for Action from the Cairo Conference on Population and Development (1994);
• Declaration and Programme for Action from the Copenhagen World Summit for Social Development (1995);
• Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action from the Fourth World Conference on Women (1995);
• Stockholm Declaration and Agenda for Action of the World Congress against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children (1996));
• Chair’s Summary and Conclusions from the Amsterdam Child Labour Conference (1997);
• Declaration of the Ninth SAARC Summit in Malé (1997));
• Cartagena Declaration on the Elimination of Child Labour (1997);
• Recommendations of the Organisation of African States (OAU) Summit in Harare (1997);
• International Conference on Child Labour in Oslo, Norway: Agenda for Action (1997);
• International Labour Organisation (ILO) Conventions, particularly
• ILO Convention (no. 29) on forced labour (1930);
• ILO Convention (no. 138) on minimum age (1973);
• ILO Convention (no. 182) on the worst forms of child labour (1999);
• Millennium Development Goals (2000);
• World Education Forum – The Dakar Framework for Action (2000);
• UNGASS – World Fit for Children (2002);

There is a growing international consv ensus that the world has fallen short of achieving the most of the goals of the World Summit for Children (WSC). This shortfall or gap is primarily because of insufficient investments.

Obstacles
Chronic poverty remains the single biggest obstacle to meeting the needs and fulfilling the rights of the children. The other hurdles hampering the child development includes;

• unconquered childhood diseases;
• restricted access and opportunities to quality childhood and primary education;
• distressed living conditions(including denial of safe drinking water and hygienic sanitation facilities);
• acute lack of access to basic social services; and
• widely prevalent violence, exploitation, abuse and discrimination.

Strategies and Actions
SANAKLP’S activities on the child survival, development, protection and participation at the national, regional and local levels include;

• providing quality primary education (promoting comprehensive early innovative non-formal free primary education of quality for the excluded and marginalized children, with focus on girls as well as bridge the gap between formal and non- formal primary education by mainstreaming the products of the latter group into the former);
• promoting healthy lives (adopting measures for reducing the infant and under-five mortality rate as well as for reducing in the maternal mortality rate through community-based demand-driven reproductive and child health services; saving the infants and children under-five from preventable death and disabilities; preventing the spread of childhood diseases, using immunization-plus as entry point for other interventions; prevention and controlling HIV infection among the children; and providing access to safe and hygienic sanitation facilities);
• protection from violence, abuse, exploitation and discrimination (implementing laws, policies and programmes for the prevention, protection, and rehabilitation, reintegration of children living in disadvantaged social situations; and who are at risk, including orphans, abandoned children, children of migrant workers, children working/ and or living on street and children living in extreme poverty from violence, abuse, exploitation and discrimination in all its forms and manifest action);
• combating child labour (effective measures for prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour as well as provide for the rehabilitation and social reintegration of children removed from the child labour by ensuring access to free basic education and ,whenever possible appropriate vocational training);
• elimination of trafficking and sexual exploitation of children (participating in concreted national and international efforts to end trafficking and sexual exploitation of children, including the use of children for pornography, prostitution and paedophilia as well as raise awareness of illegality and harmful consequences of sexual exploitation and abuse, including through trafficking in children); and
• combating HIV/AIDS (participating in natural and international strategies to prevent and control the spread of HIV/ AIDS among children as well as reduce the devastating impact of the infection on the infant and children by providing awareness, prevention, care and treatment).

Child Labour
There has been growing international consensus on the issues related to child labour- evident in various declarations, platforms conventions, programmes of action etc. They represent international benchmarks that provide common ground, often guidance and potential solutions for solving the multifaceted problem of child labour, and ensure all children are provided with supportive and protective environment for exercising their rights.

Child labour is chronically rampant in India. The form of child labour as per the international benchmark refers to forms of employment or unpaid work that violate the rights of the children and should be prohibited. Child labour is the economic exploitation of child or performance of any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child’s health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development. It goes beyond the economic exploitation or hazardous employment to include forced labour, trafficking, sexual exploitation, and the use of the children for the production and trafficking of illegal drugs.

Poverty is the principal cause of child labour. Mostly the children work to support their families and also for their own survival. Paradoxically, however, child labour further aggravates the poverty syndrome as it usually deprives the children of education and opportunity to acquire skills for acquiring earning potentials. Other causes of child labour include family indebtedness, the lack or poor quality of schooling or non-formal education, breakdown of extended family, uneducated parents, local cultural setting, high fertility rate and consumerism.

SANKALP is promoting education as the key preventive strategy against child labour. The Organisation has been promoting accessible, quality, equitable, safe, valued, relevant, flexible (particularly, flexible schedules to minimize the conflict between school attendance and part-time or seasonal work of children, especially in agricultural areas) free and community-centred non-formal primary education and vocational training as an adequate alternative to child labour. The other progarmmes of actions for eradiation of child labour include; raising awareness and respect for children’s rights, making efforts to bring attitudinal changes of families and public towards child victims (particularly victims of sexual abuse and exploitation, since the stigmatization of such children is a serious obstacle to their rehabilitation and reintegration), insisting on enforcement of child labour laws, rehabilitation and social integration. SANKALP recognizes the need for a holistic, right-based and inter-sectoral approach for confronting and eliminating child labour.