Navigating the Status of Children in India: Challenges and Prospects

India is home to over 440 million children – nearly 40% of its total population. Yet, for a significant portion of them, especially girls, childhood is not a time of equal opportunity. From the moment a girl is born – and sometimes even before – the weight of deeply embedded social norms begins to shape her access to food, healthcare, education, and a future of her own. Understanding the status of children in India requires looking not just at statistics, but at the layered social realities that determine who gets to thrive and who gets left behind.

Discrimination begins before birth
Nutrition and healthcare: the unequal plate
Education: still not equal access
The life cycle of a girl: cumulative disadvantage
Infancy and early childhood
Middle childhood and adolescence
Adulthood and economic participation
Key health indicators: MMR and IMR
Social norms that perpetuate the cycle
Where interventions are most needed

Discrimination begins before birth

In many parts of India, the preference for a son over a daughter is not merely a cultural attitude – it has measurable, harmful consequences. Gender discrimination often begins before a girl child is even born, driven by socio-cultural norms and economic considerations such as the dowry system, which frames daughters as a financial liability. This has historically contributed to practices like female foeticide and infanticide, particularly in states like Punjab and Haryana.

The demographic impact is stark. According to the 2011 Census, the child sex ratio in India stood at 919 girls for every 1,000 boys – a figure that signals not just individual family decisions, but a systemic undervaluation of female life. This skewed ratio carries long-term implications for the country’s social and demographic fabric, including rising cases of gender-based violence linked to demographic imbalances.

Nutrition and healthcare: the unequal plate

Once a girl child is born, the discrimination does not stop – it shifts into everyday life. Research consistently shows that sex plays an important role in determining access to food, health services, and educational resources, with a pronounced bias against girls in South Asian societies. Within many households, food allocation follows culturally prescribed norms – and girls routinely receive less, and of lower quality.

A particularly important finding from research on gender bias in diet and immunisation is that maternal literacy is a decisive variable: when mothers were literate, there was no gender discrimination in feeding practices. But when mothers were illiterate, girls were significantly less likely to receive adequate nutrition compared to their brothers. This reveals a critical intervention point – educating mothers is one of the most effective ways to protect daughters.

The nutritional picture is deeply troubling at a national level. According to NFHS-5 data, stunting or chronic malnutrition has increased in 11 of 17 surveyed states, and the proportion of children who are underweight has also increased in 11 states. Anemia is another critical concern – the prevalence of anemia among children aged 6-59 months rose from 58.5% in 2015-16 to 68.1% in 2019-21, a troubling reversal even as other health indicators improved.

The healthcare gap mirrors the nutrition gap. Gender-based discrimination in access to basic necessities like immunisation and nutrition in India leads to inequality in immunisation and nutritional status among Indian children. In impoverished families, girls receive less medical treatment for illnesses and fewer vaccinations – a disparity that contributes directly to higher rates of illness and preventable death among female children.

Education: still not equal access

Education is the single most powerful tool for breaking cycles of poverty and gender inequality, yet it remains unequally distributed. Female children are disadvantaged and often neglected in education, nutrition, and health services compared to male children in many low-resource settings, with socio-cultural factors adversely affecting a girl child’s educational attainment at the household level.

While India has made progress toward universal primary enrolment, the gap widens sharply at higher levels. School attendance among 16-17 year olds was 82.7% for boys compared to 78.9% for girls, and secondary and technical education enrolment remains significantly lower for girls. In rural and tribal regions, girls are routinely kept at home to assist with household chores, care for younger siblings, or support farm work – reinforcing the expectation that domestic labour is a girl’s primary contribution.

The education system itself can reinforce the problem. Textbooks and teaching materials in many schools do not challenge gender stereotypes and may perpetuate traditional roles, portraying girls as caregivers and boys as leaders. These subtle messages accumulate over a child’s formative years, limiting how girls see themselves and what they believe they can achieve. Even when girls do attend school, many face sexual harassment and a lack of adequate sanitation infrastructure – factors that disproportionately drive dropout rates among adolescent girls.

India’s primary school retention rate declined from 91% in 2023 to 85% in 2024, and secondary school retention fell from 65% to 64% – a signal that the gains made in enrolment are not being fully translated into completed education, especially for girls.

The life cycle of a girl: cumulative disadvantage

To understand the status of children in India – particularly girls – it helps to view their lives through a life course lens. The deprivations of each stage compound those of the previous one. A girl denied adequate nutrition in infancy enters childhood with compromised cognitive development. A girl pulled out of school in adolescence enters adulthood without the qualifications to access economic opportunity. The benefits of rights realised in one life stage enhance the ability to realise rights in subsequent life stages – and conversely, deprivations at one stage make future deprivations more likely.

Infancy and early childhood

The earliest years set the biological and cognitive foundation for all future development. Yet this is also when gender discrimination is most acute. In India, more girl babies die than boy babies, with the gender differential in child mortality at around 3% – and this discrimination begins before birth with an adverse sex ratio. Statistics show that parents sometimes give less attention to newborn girls; in 2017, 150,000 fewer girls were admitted to special newborn care units (SNCUs) than boys. Under-5 mortality for girls in India remains 3.3% higher than for boys – a reversal of the global pattern, where boys typically have higher under-5 mortality rates.

Middle childhood and adolescence

As children grow, gender socialization intensifies. Children start to take on greater household and economic responsibilities during adolescence, particularly in economically vulnerable families, and this burden falls disproportionately on girls. While boys tend to experience greater freedom, girls face extensive limitations on their ability to move freely and to make decisions affecting their work, education, marriage, and social relationships. Gender attitudes, which begin forming in early adolescence, are still malleable at this stage – making it the most critical window for gender-sensitisation interventions. Missing this window means those norms harden into adult behaviours.

Adulthood and economic participation

The cumulative effect of nutritional deprivation, limited education, and early marriage feeds directly into adult women’s economic vulnerability. As girls and boys age, the gender barriers continue to expand into adulthood, where only about a quarter of women are in the formal workplace. Indian women on average earn 64% of what their male counterparts earn for the same occupation and level of qualification. Child marriage accelerates this trajectory of disadvantage – child marriage has a severe impact on the Indian economy and can start a cycle of poverty that lasts for several generations, trapping not just the girl who marries young, but her children as well.

Key health indicators: MMR and IMR

Two statistics – the Maternal Mortality Ratio (MMR) and the Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) – serve as among the most revealing measures of how well a society supports the health of women and children.

India has made real progress on both fronts. For every 100,000 live births in India in 2023, 88 women died of maternal causes – down dramatically from 570 per 100,000 live births in 1990. This represents decades of concerted public health effort. On infant mortality, the NFHS-5 reported an IMR of 35 per 1,000 live births, improved from 41 in NFHS-4. Programmes like the Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY), which incentivises institutional deliveries, have been significant drivers of this improvement – institutional deliveries increased from 47% in 2007-08 to 89% in 2019-21.

But the averages mask severe regional inequality. Maternal mortality levels in India vary widely across regions, with wealthier states generally having lower maternal mortality ratios. Bihar continues to record India’s highest IMR, while Kerala has near-zero infant mortality. This is not a coincidence – it directly reflects differences in healthcare infrastructure, female literacy rates, institutional delivery access, and economic development. The eight states that have already achieved the SDG target of MMR below 70 per 100,000 live births include Kerala, Maharashtra, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Jharkhand, Gujarat, and Karnataka – all states with relatively stronger health systems and higher female literacy.

The statistics above do not emerge from nowhere – they are the product of deeply held beliefs and social structures. The dowry system, son preference, purdah norms restricting women’s mobility, caste-based hierarchies, and the expectation that daughters will “leave” their birth families upon marriage all contribute to the systemic underinvestment in girls. Particularly in the nutrition domain, lower-caste children have significantly lower indicators of health and well-being, showing that gender and caste discrimination operate together to intensify disadvantage.

Parents teach their children to adhere to inequitable gender norms during adolescence, with mothers often identified as primary agents of gender socialisation – not because women choose to perpetuate discrimination, but because they themselves have internalised the norms they grew up with. Breaking this cycle requires interventions aimed at both children and their parents simultaneously.

In the 2024 World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report, India ranked 129th among 146 nations, having closed only 64.1% of its overall gender gap. The “slight regression” from the previous year was attributed to small declines in education and political empowerment sub-indices – a reminder that progress is neither linear nor guaranteed.

Where interventions are most needed

Given the life course framework, the most effective interventions target the earliest and most critical developmental windows. A national public awareness campaign is necessary to communicate the high cost of discrimination to individual children, while health officials and NGOs need to prioritise expanded Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) centres in underserved communities. The ICDS network – which provides nutrition, pre-school education, and healthcare through Anganwadi centres – remains one of the most important policy tools for early childhood equity.

At the school level, gender-responsive support to enable out-of-school girls to learn, alongside an overhaul of textbooks so that language, images and messages do not perpetuate gender stereotypes, is essential. Child marriage prevention – including panchayat-level awareness programmes and economic support for girls’ education – addresses one of the most damaging transitions in the female life cycle. Investing in girls and women yields better health outcomes for children and families, greater economic prospects for communities, and higher country-level GDP – making gender equity not just a moral imperative, but an economic one.

The status of children in India – especially girls – reflects a society at a crossroads. Measurable gains in health indicators, school enrolment, and institutional deliveries show what is possible when policy and social commitment align. But persistent gaps in nutrition, secondary education dropout rates, child marriage, and workplace equality reveal how much remains to be done. The life cycle of a girl in India is still shaped, at nearly every stage, by forces that were not of her choosing – and that is precisely what makes equitable intervention both urgent and necessary.

What do you think? At which stage of a girl child’s life do you believe targeted interventions would have the greatest long-term impact – early childhood nutrition, adolescent education, or economic participation in adulthood? And given that gender norms are often passed down within families, how can India’s public health and education systems reach parents, not just children?

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Table of Contents

Discrimination begins before birth 🔗

Nutrition and healthcare: the unequal plate 🔗

Education: still not equal access 🔗

The life cycle of a girl: cumulative disadvantage 🔗

Infancy and early childhood 🔗

Middle childhood and adolescence 🔗

Adulthood and economic participation 🔗

Key health indicators: MMR and IMR 🔗

Social norms that perpetuate the cycle 🔗

Where interventions are most needed 🔗