Will our children pay the price for globalisation? Ask the landless dalits of Akbarpur block in Ambedkar Nagar, UP, and they’ll say yes. They will talk of how increasing costs of basic food, cuts in PDS rations and fewer jobs in the 90s forced their children to work. As if the pressures of survival in that decade were not enough, the children faced falling teacher-student ratios in government schools and the closure of eight of the 10 health sub-centres even as 15 private schools and many private doctors opened their doors to those who could pay. Say globalisation and some think of FDI, increased consumer choice, PSU divestment and subsidy cuts. Yet, for children like those in Akbarpur, globalisation means bearing the brunt of larger economic trends of declining employment growth, higher food costs, commercialisation of education and healthcare. We could compliment ourselves that the situation of Indian children has improved since Independence with better life expectancy, child survival, primary school enrolment and continuation rates. And then see these in the light of how many children we continue to fail even today when almost two million children in India die every year before reaching their first birthday. In a country with buffer stocks of foodgrains, nearly 75 million children below five years of age are malnourished. Children of 100 million families live without water at home. One in every 10 children is disabled. Nearly 11 million children call our unfriendly streets home. Experiences across the world show that children are among the most vulnerable when local economies are opened up to global market forces without investing in and providing adequate safeguards for the poor. These negative effects are visible where basic services such as health, education and water are commercialised. Bangladesh , Kenya and India have seen families withdraw children from school as a response to the increasing cost of education. In the decade of economic reforms, the Indian government spent a lower proportion of national income on social sectors than in the 80s. The PDS is now available only to the poorest of the poor, defined so as to leave out large numbers of poor people. For 60 per cent of the population, including children dependent on agriculture, the higher costs of fertilisers, pesticides and seeds are making it virtually impossible to survive. On the one hand, while selling, farmers receive a fraction of the price of a decade ago. On the other, foodgrain prices have jumped (10.2 per cent for rice) in the 90s affecting the ability to purchase basic food requirements resulting in mass hunger among the rural poor. Unsurprisingly, in such situations of deprivation, women and children suffer the most. The shift towards casual and contract labour worsens the situation for children. Lack of regular employment opportunities for adults makes them resort to the worst survival strategy — sending children to work to make up the gap in family income. Evidence from Andhra Pradesh shows that 60 per cent of the 247,800 children working in cotton seed production had dropped out from school to replace adult earnings lost when corporations consolidated the family farms for cash crop plantation. Adult male migration in search of jobs is increasingly leaving women on their own to fend for the household and care for children. Girls, in particular, get pulled into sibling care and housework forcing them to forgo education and the opportunity of childhood. The Central government allocation for elementary education has seemingly increased but is far from adequate for providing quality education to all out-of-school children. Under-qualified and underpaid “para teachers” will impart education to several million first-generation learners. These children will be handicapped in competing with those educated in formal schools and breaking the cycle of poverty will remain a dream for most. While private schools are burgeoning across the country, government schools are being closed down under guise of non-performance rather than improving the quality of education. School closure and land sale for commercial complexes in Ahmedabad in 1998 and the closure of 30 schools in Indore in 1999 have been reported. Of late, instead of increasing investments in health and making services more accessible, the government is not only withdrawing from providing health services to the poor, but is encouraging commercialisation of healthcare services. Currently, the government accounts for only one-fourth of the spending on health whereas households contribute three-fourths. This often pushes the already vulnerable poor into indebtedness; in over 40 per cent hospitalisation episodes, costs were met by either selling assets or taking loans. Numerous children in India continue to live a life threatened by malnourishment, disease and death, with government policies offering no respite in the future. At the World Social Forum in Mumbai, several civil society organisations have come together in the hope of constructing “Another World”. It is time that domestic and international governments and institutions are held accountable for the impact of their policy decisions on large numbers of vulnerable Indian children.