Child Well-Being Index : Kerala bags top spot

According to the Child Well-Being index, Kerala bagged the top spot due to its exceptional performance in health, nutrition and education facilities.

The Child Well-Being Index, released on Tuesday, is a tool designed to measure and track children’s well-being through three dimensions of healthy individual development, positive relationships and protective contexts. The index has been developed by NGOs World Vision India and IFMR LEAD.

Focusing on the three key dimensions, 24 indicators were selected to develop the computation of the child well-being index.

The index captures the performance of each state and union territory on a composite child well-being score. Among states, Kerala (0.76), Tamil Nadu (0.67) and Himachal Pradesh (0.67) bagged the top three slots in the index.

Meghalaya (0.53), Jharkhand (0.50) and Madhya Pradesh (0.44) featured at the bottom, the index said.

“Kerala bagged the top spot with the the state providing a healthy start to its children. More children were completing school and were able to have access to quality education,” the report said.

Kerala also performed better in addressing malnutrition and ensuring child survival and access to a healthy environment in terms of clean drinking water and sanitation facilities, it said.

For Jharkhand, child survival, nutrition and access to water and sanitation are the key areas that need to be focussed on, to improve its score. More children were stunted and underweight, access to institutional delivery was low and a higher number of children were dying before they turned five, the index said.

Efforts need to be taken to ensure children complete schooling, since more children were dropping out of school in Jharkhand, the report said.

“Survival, nutrition and basic education are other aspects in which Jharkhand performed lowest among all Indian states,” the report said.

Low performance in the areas of child survival, nutrition, crimes against children and juvenile crimes, brought the scores down for Madhya Pradesh, the index said.

More children live in poorer families in Madhya Pradesh, it added.