India is a unique case in the area of early child care with the society approving of virtues like breast-feeding, yet the nutrition status remaining low, top UNICEF officials said in New Delhi on Wednesday even as they maintained that the country has recorded improvement in this field in recent years. “India is a difficult and unique case where, unlike many western countries, breast-feeding is not undermined, but there is late introduction of food and on nutrition status it is not doing well,” senior UNICEF India official Patrice Engle told reporters. She said that between 1992 and 1998, India has recorded a considerable improvement in early child care, however social stigma continued in various forms.
Stating that 56 per cent of Indian women still believed that there was one reason or the other for them to be beaten, she called for immediate streamlining of national children and families policies. Presiding over the pre-launch session of release of 'The state of the world's children 2001', UNICEF India Head Maria Calivis said that absence of proper care for children was an invisible and irreversible brain drain of worse kind.
“The place to break the cycle of poverty begins with pregnancy and should continue for first 36 months of the child,” She said. The report, among other things, states that UN General Assembly's special session on children scheduled in September would chart out a new agenda for children. Bureau Report