On 20 November 2009, the global community celebrates the 20th anniversary of the adoption by the United Nations General Assembly of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the unique document that sets international standards for the care, treatment and protection of all individuals below age 18. To celebrate this landmark, the United Nations Children's Fund is dedicating a special edition of its flagship report The State of the World's Children to examining the Convention's evolution, progress achieved on child rights, challenges remaining, and actions to be taken to ensure that its promise becomes a reality for all children.

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.

Contributed articles.

This book offers a comprehensive exploration of child well-being within the context of Indian states, focusing on the progress made in eight Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) targets. What sets this book apart is its unique perspective, as it delves into the well-being of children, examining their experiences across six key dimensions: child poverty and deprivation, anthropometric failure and undernutrition, child health and healthcare services, quality education, violence and gender equity, and overall child well-being. The book relies on data from various data sources such as the National Family Health Survey, Unified District Information System, and National Crime Records Bureau statistics. The child well-being score is calculated following the UNDP methodology, enabling a ranking of states and districts in terms of their progress between 2015-16 and 2019-21. In addition to rigorous quantitative analysis, the book delves into the implications of key policies like the National Education Policy, National Health Policy, social protection schemes, and Poshan Abhiyan on child development and their role in achieving SDG targets. It systematically compares the performance of Indian states in relation to SDG targets, using child-specific indicators, making this book truly unique. It incorporates more than 30 child-related indicators, spanning the eight child-specific SDGs selected for analysis. The child well-being achievement score from 2015-16 serves as a baseline for assessing the progress toward SDG goals. The indicators presented in this book serve as valuable tools for tracking SDG progress and sustainably monitoring child well-being at the state level. Ultimately, the book not only reveals the depth of deprivations but also provides a roadmap for region-specific priority areas, strongly advocating for child-centric policy interventions. This book will be useful for the academicians, policy makers, government officials, civil bodies, NGOs and other research communities including doctoral researchers who are working in the field of child wellbeing.

Through a rich ethnography of street and working children in Calcutta, India, this book offers the first sustained enquiry into postcolonial childhoods, arguing that the lingering effects of colonialism are central to comprehending why these children struggle to inhabit the transition from labour to schooling.

"The prevalence of child undernutrition in India is among the highest in the world, nearly double that of Sub-Saharan Africa, with dire consequences for morbidity, mortality, productivity and economic growth. Drawing on qualitative studies and quantitative evidence from large household surveys, this book explores the dimensions of child undernutrition in India and examines the effectiveness of the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS)program, India's main early child development intervention, in addressing it. Although levels of undernutrition in India declined modestly during the 1990s, the reductions lagged behind those achieved by other countries with similar economic growth. Nutritional inequalities across different states and socioeconomic and demographic groups remain large. Although the ICDS program appears to be well-designed and well-placed to address the multi-dimensional causes of malnutrition in India, several problems exist that prevent it from reaching its potential. The book concludes with a discussion of a number of concrete actions that can be taken to bridge the gap between the policy intentions of ICDS and its actual implementation."