A children’s rights group in India has found that the parents of two boys, aged six and eight, are seriously ill due to Covid-19 and unable to care for them. These children have been hungry for many days.
According to Reuters, the children’s rights group Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA) informed them that the boys met in a small village in a rural town in India and could be guessed from the incident In India, children affected by the devastating coronavirus are facing emergencies.
Due to the dramatic increase in infections and deaths, there is no one to look after children in poor communities because their parents or other relatives are critically ill or have died.
Dhananjay Tangal, executive director of the Childhood Rescue Movement, said that as the death toll rose, the crisis was that either the children were losing their parents or their caregivers were hospitalized. There was nobody to look after him.
India is struggling to cope with the virus due to poor funding in the social services sector and in some parts of the country it is considered an untouchable disease that is isolating children.
Dhananjay Tangal said neighbors and close family members do not want to help them because they are afraid of infection and treat these families like untouchables.
No further details were shared about the two boys as their information was kept confidential.
Dhananjay Tangal said the Childhood Rescue Movement, led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Kailash Satyarthi, had started receiving calls in early April regarding children severely affected by the Code-19 epidemic. The volume of calls increased after Satyarthi shared the helpline number on Twitter on April 29.
The Childhood Rescue Movement now receives about 70 calls a day from parents who have died or become seriously ill, and a large number of calls come from parents who have tested positive for corona and want to know. If their health is not good, can the group take care of their children?
