When Policy Meets the Ground: A Child Rights Worker’s Lens
From classrooms to campaigns, CRY’s work underscores that child rights are not just social commitments but barometers of governance and policy delivery.
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SDG 3: Good Health & Well-being | SDG 4: Quality Education | SDG 16: Peace, Justice & Strong Institutions
Institutions: Ministry of Women & Child Development | Ministry of Education | Ministry of Health & Family Welfare
In a village in Haryana’s Mewat district, parents once told Shivansh Mishra that sending their daughters to school was a luxury they could not afford.
“They worried that time in classrooms would clash with farm work and household chores,” he recalls. “Girls were needed to fetch water, gather firewood, or care for younger siblings, and school was often a long walk away.”
For Shivansh, then newly with Child Rights and You (CRY), the conversation captured a central dilemma of social policy.
“It made clear that policy intent alone is not enough,” he says. “Unless families see how schooling fits into their everyday lives, it will always come second.”
This was not simply a gap between good ideas and poor delivery. Parents were weighing the opportunity cost of education against the survival needs of the household. CRY’s challenge was to show how policy could rebalance those incentives.
From Policy Design to Practice: Why CRY Matters
The breakthrough came after long evenings with village elders and panchayat leaders. Shivansh and his team showed how schemes like MGNREGA could ease household needs and how midday meals could offset schooling costs.
“When parents saw that education didn’t mean losing labour, the fear gave way to cautious acceptance,” he says. “Enrolment rose, but only because policy was shown to work with, not against, their realities.”
It is this connection between design and practice that drew Shivansh to CRY in 2022.
“CRY’s forty-five-year history shows it can engage with today’s policies, anticipate tomorrow’s challenges, and respond quickly as an implementation partner,” he explains. “The lens is always children, but the context is the socio-economic and historical realities they grow up in.”
Through 100+ partner organisations, CRY now works across 20 states, reaching 4.7 million children. Its footprint spans education, health, nutrition, protection, and participation.
“A girl who drops out of school is not just an education statistic,” Shivansh points out. “She may also be at risk of marriage, labour, or trafficking. Policy must be read at the intersections, because that’s where children live.”
This underscores a larger truth: while laws and schemes are often single-issue, lived realities overlap.
“CRY’s strength,” he argues, “is to use its presence on the ground to bring these intersections into policy conversations.”
Evidence from the Margins: Tribal Communities
For Shivansh, the challenge of tribal children shows how ambitious policy can falter without localised evidence. Laws may guarantee services, but families change only when benefits are visible.
“Policies for these groups are ambitious, but without data to gauge their progress they remain incomplete,” he says.
CRY has worked with NITI Aayog and several state governments to build evidence on Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs). Alongside surveys, it sets up transitional schools so children keep learning until formal access improves. But as Shivansh notes,
“Data is only the starting point. The important question is not only whether services are provided, but which changes emerge once they are in place, which challenges reduce, and which persist?”
The deeper issue, he argues, is state capacity – whether public institutions can deliver consistently.
“Data shows governments where to act,” he says. “But until that capacity is built, interim solutions are necessary.”
Campaigns as Policy Instruments: Soft Nudges, Hard Lessons
Public campaigns are often mistaken for slogans, but for CRY they are tools that translate abstract policy into lived practice.
“What people see is the hashtag or the poster,” he says. “But what matters is the grind behind it.”
Take #LearnNotEarn, which spotlighted child labour. CRY worked with officials to track children slipping out of school.
“We realised dropout data on its own was not enough,” Shivansh says. “It was only when education officers and child protection officials came together that dropout rates fell. Policy support mattered too - midday meals were as important as awareness drives.”
In policy terms, these campaigns act as soft instruments -- nudges that reshape norms until harder law or schemes catch up. By aligning with entitlements, CRY made them part of the system.
The same logic shaped #YellowFellow, a campaign on childhood anaemia that reached tens of millions by 2022. Bright wristbands drew attention, but what sustained the effort was alignment with POSHAN Abhiyaan, India’s nutrition programme.
“Parents engaged more when Anganwadi workers led nutrition days in their own villages,” Shivansh explains. “By linking with POSHAN Abhiyaan, we weren’t outsiders talking about anaemia - we were part of a national effort families already recognised.”
The deeper lesson, he adds, was about legitimacy:
“Policy language is abstract. Campaigns translate it into something people can see, hear, or even wear. That is what bridges the gap.”
Federal Diversity as Laboratories of Policies
India’s federal system means national frameworks take different shapes in different states. In 2017, when states were asked to draft action plans for children, CRY supported the process. Outcomes varied: Goa and Bihar made them law; Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Odisha, and Mizoram adopted them as policy.
The most testing encounter came in Lucknow in 2023. Shivansh recalls officials pressing: “How will this be funded? Do we have the capacity to run it alongside existing schemes? What makes it different from Delhi’s guidelines?” Their questions reflected administrative overload more than resistance.
“It wasn’t resistance for its own sake,” he says. “It was a concern about stretching already thin resources.”
To address this, CRY offered to co-finance pilots, train district staff under the Integrated Child Protection Scheme, and adapt tested modules. “We had to show it wasn’t an extra burden but a support system,” he says.
By contrast, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh met the same proposal with enthusiasm.
“The positive energy in those meetings was striking,” Shivansh notes. “It reminded me that dialogue can open doors in different ways, depending on context.”
The policy lesson is clear: stronger bureaucracies and higher social spending create receptiveness, while thinner capacity breeds caution. Federal diversity thus becomes both a laboratory of innovation and a barrier to uniform progress.
Shivansh is clear that India’s child rights framework is stronger today than at any time in recent decades. Over the past twenty years, Parliament has passed landmark laws such as the Right to Education Act, the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, and the Juvenile Justice Act. Schemes like Integrated Child Protection Services and POSHAN Abhiyaan have created a scaffolding for delivery.
“These frameworks give us room to act,” he says. “They allow us to bring evidence, suggest improvements, and scale interventions. But the real challenge is ensuring that commitments on paper translate into meaningful outcomes for children’s lives.”
CRY’s role has been to make these frameworks workable on the ground. Its status reports on education and nutrition have informed state reviews, while its campaigns have reinforced entitlements such as the midday meal scheme and POSHAN Abhiyaan for children most at risk. By feeding field evidence back into governments, CRY helps turn frameworks into living instruments rather than static promises.
Every Child Counts: The Policy Test of Governance
For Shivansh, the challenge is no longer passing laws or launching schemes, but ensuring governance continually translates policy intent into lived outcomes. That translation, he argues, is dynamic — requiring dialogue, data, experimentation, and patience. CRY’s motto, “every child counts,” is for him not a slogan but a standard of governance.
“The measure of success is whether every child is not only counted in data, but seen in practice.”
In this sense, children become indicators of the state itself. If they are present in classrooms, nourished in homes, and protected in communities, it signals a system capable of delivery. If not, the gaps tell their own story. Looking ahead, Shivansh believes this test will only grow sharper as India faces digital divides, climate shocks, and online vulnerabilities.
“They show us,” he says, “whether our institutions work.”
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Shivansh Mishra is a Consultant at CRY (Child Rights and You). All the details are based on his account and have been approved for publication. This piece was prepared with assistance from Ms Sapna Singh, a member of the editorial team at The Policy Edge.