This Children's Day, the underprivileged children make an appeal to the state and the society to empower them through providing good education, health care and fighting the evils of child marriage and trafficking. We constitute over a third of India's population and yet our issues remain largely invisible, de-prioritized and mostly neglected. It is true that there are a plethora of positive and progressive laws, policies and programmes for us. Yet, the situation remains the same, with unmet targets and worsening trends seen in nearly all child rights indicators over the past decade and more. The reason for this, we feel, is the significant gap between the intent and implementation. Not enough thought is given to the kind of service delivery mechanism that one needs to put in place for implementing programmes and policies related to us.

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