Children’s Rights in India: Who Speaks for Them?
“The child has always been the forgotten citizen.” — Maria Montessori
On July 25, Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned after weeks of student protests over the NEET-UG examination crisis. Three days later, on July 28, students from classes VI to XII staged a sit-in at Sarvodaya Inter College in Fatehpur, Uttar Pradesh, holding portraits of B.R. Ambedkar and handmade placards. Their complaints included broken desks, exposed live wires, a lack of drinking water, and no fans in the summer heat. Within a day, the District Inspector of Schools gave written assurances on most of their demands. The same grievances had gone nowhere through the local bureaucracy for months.
Side by side, Fatehpur and the NEET protests organised by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) look like evidence that a generation has learned how to extract concessions from the state. There are, however, important differences. Stories from Fatehpur foreground older teenagers as organisers and spokespersons. Younger children rarely appear as narrators at all, because adults tend not to treat them as credible witnesses to what has gone wrong. The CJP movement is largely discussed through older students and young adults, although at least one 14-year-old has also become part of the story. No one in these accounts is young enough to depend entirely on an adult to carry a grievance into the public sphere.
The way we talk about youth and protest assumes that a person must reach an age of majority before their grievances can acquire political legitimacy. The state has built a dense system of institutions around children. India has a statutory child rights commission with civil court powers, School Management Committees (SMCs) in schools covered by the Right to Education Act, and digital systems that track nutrition and school infrastructure. Yet none of this helped the students in Fatehpur until teenagers walked out of class. A much younger child still has no straightforward way to insist that her classroom be safe, well-lit, and clean.
Education theoristKrishna Kumar has argued that Indian schooling treats children primarily as recipients of content rather than as active participants in the learning process. In What Is Worth Teaching?, Kumar traces this to what he calls the “archaic view of teaching as a successful delivery of known facts”, rooted in treating curriculum as little more than “a bag of facts”. Content is poured into children at speed, while very little is expected to travel back the other way. Social science introduces rights largely through the language of elections. A 10-year-old therefore learns to imagine accountability as something that begins at the ballot box, while the broken tap in her school sits much further down the chain, if it appears in that chain at all.
Child-rights scholar Roger Hart’s ladder of children’s participation describes eight levels, from manipulation, decoration, and tokenism at the bottom to situations in which children initiate activities and share decisions with adults at the top. Hart defines participation as the process of sharing decisions that affect one’s life and the life of the community. Most official encounters with younger children in India take place near the lower end of this ladder, whether it is a Chief Minister distributing school bags in front of cameras or a cultural programme in which children repeat lines written by adults. The Fatehpur students come much closer to the upper rungs. They identified what had gone wrong, organised themselves, and secured a response from the administration. A child in class II, sitting in the same building, has far less agency and mobility and would struggle to make the same demands.
Students from classes VI to XII staged a sit-in at Sarvodaya Inter College in Fatehpur, on July 28, 2026. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
Amartya Sen distinguishes between having a formal entitlement and having the freedom and capacity to turn that entitlement into an outcome that one values. In Development as Freedom, Sen argues that “there is a strong case for judging individual advantage in terms of the capabilities that a person has, that is, the substantive freedoms he or she enjoys to lead the kind of life he or she has reason to value”. A 6-year-old in a government school has, under Section 19 of the Right to Education (RTE) Act, a legal claim to facilities including toilets, drinking water, and a safe school environment. Yet that legal claim does not necessarily give the child any practical means of securing them. A 5-year-old in an anganwadi or Balvatika, just outside that age band, has no comparable foothold under the RTE Act. Neither child can organise a protest, and neither is usually treated as a credible narrator of what is wrong with their school.
Where ICDS and RTE do not meet
In India, early childhood care took shape under the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), launched in October 1975 as a government programme providing nutrition, preschool education and health-related services to children under six. The RTE Act was enacted in 2009 and came into force in 2010, creating a statutory entitlement to elementary education for children between 6 and 14. Anganwadis and pre-primary sections attached to schools sit between these two systems.
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On the school side, the Ministry of Education’s Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+) 2025-26 report shows that drinking water and girls’ toilets are reported in 99.5 per cent and 98.5 per cent of schools, respectively. Only 40.1 per cent of schools have a dedicated toilet for children with special needs. The report also says that 95 per cent of India’s 14.67 lakh schools have an electricity connection, leaving roughly 73,000 without one.
A 2022 Lok Sabha reply on honorariums and wages recorded 13.89 lakh operational anganwadi centres as of June 2021, with 13.14 lakh workers and 11.74 lakh helpers in position. Assuming one worker and one helper per centre, that amounted to roughly 75,000 fewer workers and 2.15 lakh fewer helpers than operational centres. The gaps were particularly visible in Uttar Pradesh, which had 1,89,309 operational centres but 25,446 fewer workers and 49,553 fewer helpers. Madhya Pradesh had 1,564 fewer workers and 15,120 fewer helpers. A separate 2026 Lok Sabha answer on vacancies and honorariums in Karnataka reported 3,809 vacant worker posts and 12,022 vacant helper posts as of February 2026.
A 2025 reply on the implementation of ICDS, drawing on Poshan Tracker data, reported about 8.93 crore registered beneficiaries nationwide. A recent Press Information Bureau backgrounder describes Poshan Tracker as the digital backbone of Mission Saksham Anganwadi and Poshan 2.0. By May 2026, it said, the system maintained a live monthly database tracking nutrition indicators for more than 7.7 crore children using verified Aadhaar-authenticated data and had enabled growth monitoring for more than 6.3 crore children aged zero to five.
The state can see the anganwadi child with precision. Her height, weight, and enrolment sit on a central dashboard in real time. The harder and important question is whether that child can make the state see her.
The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) is supposed to provide part of that oversight. It is a statutory body established under the Commissions for Protection of Child Rights Act, 2005. Section 31 of the RTE Act gives it specific responsibilities for monitoring the right to education and examining safeguards under the Act.
The NCPCR can review safeguards, take suo motu notice of violations, and press governments to correct failures. Its latest annual report suggests that the system is struggling to keep up. The commission has invested heavily in e-BaalNidan, an online complaint portal through which citizens and organisations can report violations of child rights and track their cases. The system is useful for older children and adults who have the literacy, time, and support needed to file a complaint and follow it up.
Between April 2023 and March 2024, the NCPCR took cognisance of 46,417 fresh complaints. Added to a backlog of 17,671, this produced a caseload of 64,088. The commission disposed of 7,508 matters and carried 56,580 into the next year. Education complaints accounted for 5,999 of the total, of which only 587 were closed.
The state-wise figures are just as sobering. Madhya Pradesh had 16,572 complaints and closed 1,922. Uttar Pradesh had 7,486 and closed 798. Chhattisgarh had 6,277 and closed 964. In each case, thousands of alleged violations of child rights remained pending.
There is little evidence that the NCPCR uses systems such as UDISE+ or Poshan Tracker to identify patterns of neglect on its own or to launch audits before complaints arrive. In practice, the machinery tends to move when someone capable of filing a complaint pushes it from below. A 5-year-old rarely has such a proxy.
Norway offers one model for what a more proactive watchdog could look like. In 1981, it became the first country in the world to establish an Ombudsman for Children (here an Ombudsperson), a statutory office that “may act on its own initiative or at the request of other people”, rather than depending entirely on someone capable of filing a complaint. The office is also mandated to monitor how Norwegian authorities comply with the Convention on the Rights of the Child, raise concerns directly with government ministers and lawmakers, and identify areas each year where children’s rights need strengthening. These functions come closer to the proactive oversight that the NCPCR could exercise under Section 31 of the RTE Act.
Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) founder Abhijeet Dipke interacting with children from government schools in Maharashtra. | Photo Credit: @abhijeet_dipke/X
The CJP has also stepped into this space. Its “School Thik Karo” campaign, launched on August 15, 2026, asks citizens to conduct social audits of government schools, documenting problems with toilets, drinking water, electricity, classroom safety, furniture, midday meals, and teacher attendance. The campaign began with an audit of a government school in Maharashtra’s Hingoli district and subsequently spread to other states, including Rajasthan, Delhi, and Telangana. In Rajasthan, a CJP team’s attempt to inspect a government school in Jaipur district led to a confrontation with local residents and a political row over the condition of the school. The Tribune subsequently reported that the campaign had helped push the Rajasthan government towards a broader school-revamp programme.
Committees on paper, hierarchies in the room
School Management Committees, or SMCs, are intended to provide another layer of accountability. Under Section 21 of the RTE Act, schools covered by the provision must constitute SMCs, with at least three-quarters of members drawn from parents or guardians, proportionate representation for disadvantaged and weaker sections, and women making up at least half of the committee. The idea is simple: members of the community should be able to speak for children who cannot speak for themselves.
New national guidelines issued in 2026 on SMC composition and roles spell out detailed norms for membership, elections, training, and sub-committees. They encourage proportionate representation for socio-economically disadvantaged groups and children with special needs. Under this framework, the head teacher serves as Member Secretary, responsible for convening meetings, maintaining records and ensuring that the school’s UDISE+ report card is displayed on site.
A 2014 Human Rights Watch report on discrimination in Uttar Pradesh documented Dalit, Adivasi, and Muslim parents who had never even heard of SMCs. In Sonbhadra, a principal justified the absence of Ghasiya tribal parents from the committee by saying they were “not active”, even though interviews suggested that fear of retaliation and dependence on local landowners kept them away. A 2025 review of SMCs and School Development and Monitoring Committees found that meetings were irregular, school staff and local elites dominated proceedings, and mothers, who make up most parent members, often felt unable to speak freely.
The 2026 guidelines try to address some of these problems through training and community mobilisation, but crucial safeguards remain weak. When more candidates contest than there are seats, the guidelines make a show of hands or a voice vote the default method of voting. A secret ballot is available when a dispute or unresolved contention arises. Representation for disadvantaged groups is described in proportional terms, without hard minimums. The head teacher initiates the election process and serves as Member Secretary.
For a Dalit mother, the same local hierarchy that controls access to wage work or land may sit across the table from her in the committee. Fatehpur tells us what organised older students can achieve. It tells us much less about the 5-year-old in the anganwadi or the Dalit mother who fears angering the head teacher. Real accountability for those children would require several specific changes.
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One is an NCPCR that uses its mandate to audit before complaints pile up. Section 31 of the RTE Act allows the commission to examine safeguards and review implementation. It could select a small number of high-burden districts each year using UDISE Plus and Poshan Tracker, focusing on places where schools have reported no electricity for several years or where anganwadis have persistent staff vacancies or gaps in growth monitoring. The commission could then require corrective plans, conduct sample inspections and publish deadlines. Its performance would be measured not only by the number of complaints it closes, but also by whether the underlying violations decline.
Another is SMCs that genuinely protect the parents they are supposed to empower. Making a secret ballot the default for SMC elections, setting numerical quotas for SC and ST parents based on their children’s share of enrolment, and creating independent procedures for complaints against other parent members would reduce the cost of speaking up for those who fear local retaliation. Parents whose children are most vulnerable to discrimination would have a better chance of staying in the room.
A third is to use data systems as early-warning mechanisms. Poshan Tracker already records when growth monitoring has not taken place for months, while UDISE+ records which schools lack electricity or functional toilets. States could designate some of these patterns as triggers for mandatory visits, repairs and follow-up. Combined with a more proactive NCPCR and better-protected SMCs, this would give even the quietest children some form of oversight.
The task is to make sure that the 5-year-old who cannot yet protest is not left outside the idea of citizenship. A public system worthy of that word would treat her rights as something owed to her now, while she is still in the anganwadi and primary section. Those rights should remain in force when she is old enough to walk out of class. If we get that part right, the day she finally holds a placard of her own will feel like a continuation of something the system had already learned to take seriously.
Rahul Verma is a sociologist and independent researcher who writes on education, labour, and social inequality in India.
