The book is a comprehensive compendium on child rights in India from a child development perspective. It discusses the challenges that Indian children face for survival, development and education, especially if they are marginalized through disability, lack of care, and poverty. The major issues expounded by the author in relation to rights are infant and child survival, early child development, street and working children, children in conflict with law, children with disabilities, child trafficking and child sexual abuse. The author goes further to delve into the causes, among which are high population, poverty, migration, illiteracy, poor legislation and deep-rooted social norms and behaviour. The book presents the existing policy and legal framework in India for each of these issues. The broad purpose of the book is to comprehensively discuss the roadblocks that the marginalized child in India faces, to understand the causes of these roadblocks and to evaluate government and civil society action for children in India.

Legislation is one of the most important tools for empowering children. It reflects the commitment of the state to promote an ideal and progressive value system. Recent years have seen several key developments in the law, policy, and practice related to child rights. Significantly, with the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989, a rights-based approach has acquired prominence in the child rights discourse across the world. The book analyses the laws in the light of court judgments and policy initiatives taken in India. It also examines the interventions and strategies employed by non-governmental organizations in recommending legislative reforms in support of children. This fully revised third edition focuses on the new legal developments in India—such as the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015; the new Central Adoption Resource Agency guidelines; the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009; and the National Food Security Act, 2013—thus attempting to integrate the law in theory and field practice.

This comprehensive volume intends to serve as a basic resource book, which examines both the existing legislation and recommends future reforms for the protection of child rights in India.

Set against the backdrop of social change and globalization, this book presents the contents and contours of adolescence in contemporary urban India. Based on the trends derived from a series of mixed-method studies with adolescent girls and boys, and parents from urban upper middle class families, it explores adolescents’ and parents’ interpretations of the stage of adolescence, illustrates views on parenting, and discusses approaches to interpersonal disagreements to derive a framework of the parent-adolescent relationship. Drawing from the cultural-contextual perspective of human development, the book in its essence offers a culturally and contextually sensitive model of adolescence that is shaped along the central tenets of family interdependence, harmony, and sensitivity to parental concerns. Highlighted as well are aspects that have remained mostly unexplored, for example, adolescents’ capacity for empathy and perspective taking, and emerging issues of autonomy in a primarily relational culture. At a broader level, the book reflects upon the interplay of cultural continuity and change, and contributes to an understanding of globalizing influences on human development. Overall, the depiction of adolescent development captured in the book has significant implications for enhancing family relationships and fostering self-growth---elements that are crucial for positive youth development.The book will be of immense use to scholars in human development, psychology, and allied fields as well as to practitioners who work with adolescents.

We, the children of India— Former Chief Justice Leila Seth makes the words of the Preamble to the Constitution understandable to even the youngest reader. What is a democratic republic, why are we secular, what is sovereignty? Believing that it is never too early for young people to learn about the Constitution, she tackles these concepts and explains them in a manner everyone can grasp and enjoy. Accompanied by numerous photographs, captivating and inspiring illustrations by acclaimed illustrator Bindia Thapar, and delightful bits of trivia, We, the Children of India is essential reading for every young citizen.

India has the largest number of non-schoolgoing working children in the world. Why has the government not removed them from the labor force and required that they attend school, as have the governments of all developed and many developing countries? To answer this question, this major comparative study first looks at why and when other states have intervened to protect children against parents and employers. By examining Europe of the nineteenth century, the United States, Japan, and a number of developing countries, Myron Weiner rejects the argument that children were removed from the labor force only when the incomes of the poor rose and employers needed a more skilled labor force. Turning to India, the author shows that its policies arise from fundamental beliefs, embedded in the culture, rather than from economic conditions. Identifying the specific values that elsewhere led educators, social activists, religious leaders, trade unionists, military officers, and government bureaucrats to make education compulsory and to end child labor, he explains why similar groups in India do not play the same role.

Including conversations with world leaders, Nobel prizewinners, business leaders, artists and Olympians, Vikas Shah quizzes the minds that matter on the big questions that concern us all.