ABSTRACT
This chapter emphasizes the argument that recognizing child rights as rights will provide a deepening of the rights discourse. It offers the profound implications of engaging with empathy as an approach to resolving the debates and dilemmas of the rights discourse. The chapter goes on to argue that the very low public investments in the protection, nutrition, education and health of ‘left out’ children is not because resources do not exist for them but because their lives do not matter in the way the lives of the children born into more privileged backgrounds do. Public policy and law for children must begin therefore with the starting point of the ‘last child first’, as well as robust social and cultural engagement with normative frameworks of caste, class and gender that justify the continuance of unequal childhoods. Mander’s chapter presents a nuanced critique of the lack of political will on the part of the Indian state towards its commitment to ensuring equal, dignified and abuse-free childhood for all children.
