The Declaration of the Rights of the Child was adopted unanimously in November 1959 by the General Assembly of the United Nations. Its preamble proclaims that "Mankind owes to the child the best it has to give. It is the right of the child to have opportunities to develop physically, mentally, socially in conditions of freedom and dignity within home and outside home."
The United Nations had declared 1987 as the "International Year of Shelter for the Homeless" and Governments everywhere were designing and implementing schemes to provide shelter.
For the child the home should be a haven of security, free of friction, where the foundation of self-confidence, initiative, creativeness, self-discipline and aptitude for cooperation are laid. A child's personality flowers to fullness here and it becomes a sustaining memory in later years. The instinct to build a home and "play home" is dormant in every child and is a basic need. Yet millions of children in India, and indeed the world over, are deprived of this. They live in deplorable conditions, in extreme cases, being abandoned altogether and turning to delinquency or beggary.
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