Bhubaneswar: Former AIIMS-Bhubaneswar director Ashok Mohapatra, Wednesday, said that the government is violating child rights and human rights by closing the schools in the state in the wake of Covid-19 pandemic.
Mohapatra said this at a workshop on ‘Human Rights: Covid-19 and India’s Resilience’ organized by World Human Rights Protection Organization on the eve of International Human Rights Day.
Mohapatra claimed that children are at low risk of getting infected by the novel coronavirus. “Despite this, schools have been shut for the last several months. The school closure is affecting the kids in a big way. This is a kind of human rights violation,” he said.
The former director of AIIMS-Bhubaneswar opined that greed and unethical practices are the main reason behind human rights violation. “Human beings need at least four things – water, food, air and shelter—to survive. But many people in the country are struggling to get these four basic things, which is nothing but violation of their human rights,” Mohapatra said.
According to him, the Covid-19 pandemic has made the human beings helpless. “Now, we should come forward to help each other by following Covid-19 norms, including wearing of masks, social distancing and hand washing,” he added.
Participating in the workshop, a few experts highlighted the prevailing inequality in the distribution of national wealth in India. The inequality in income and wealth distribution is also a violation of human rights, they asserted.
As per reports, India’s richest 1 per cent of the population holds 42.5 per cent of national wealth while the bottom 50 per cent, the majority of the population, owns a meagre 2.8 per cent.
According to a report by Oxfam, India’s top 10 per cent of the population holds 74.3 per cent of the total national wealth while the bottom 90 per cent holds 25.7 per cent of the same. India ranked at 144 out of 156 countries in the World Happiness Index-2019, the experts opined.
Former advisor to Election Commission, Bhagban Prakash, said that industrialists and corporate houses get more preferential treatment than farmers in the country.