Cabinet nod okays bill to protect kids

The Union Cabinet today approved a watershed bill to protect children below the age of 16 against sexual offences, aimed at speedy trail through special courts and having a legal regime at par with best international practices. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Mar 4, 2011, 24:00:44 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Union Cabinet on Thursday approved a watershed bill to protect children below the age of 16 years against sexual offences aimed at speedy trail through special courts and having a legal regime at par with the best international practices.

The bill to be introduced in the ongoing budget session defines sexual assault against children in five categories.

Penetrative sexual assault has been defined as any sexual crime with a jail term of minimum seven years that can be extended up to life imprisonment.

Second is the aggravated penetrative sexual assault, where the accused is a person, who should have protected a child such as a police officer, hospital staff, school functionary and a family members or a relative, turns his or her tormentor.

This provision is also applicable where a child loses his mental balance because of the sexual assault or is inflicted with HIV or another other life-threatening disease and covers differentially abled children, also. Punishment for the second category is minimum 10 years of jail extended up to life imprisonment.

Third is sexual assault, where there is no penetration and jail term prescribed is three to five years.

The fourth is aggravated sexual assault committed by a person, who should have protected the child and have a jail of five to seven years. Fifth is sexual harassment punishable with maximum of three years of jail or fine or both.

The proposed law, which also provides protection to children against pornography abuse, shifts the onus of proving oneself innocent from the prosecution to the accused, as applicable in many women-related laws.

“It is a good law but lacks provisions for proper rehabilitation of the victims,” said Bharati Ali of an NGO HAQ: Center for Child Rights.

The women and child development ministry, which has piloted the bill, has signed an MoU with all states to implement the National Child Protection Scheme, for which the finance minister has provided more than R200 crore in the budget.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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