Cong’s designer saree gift

Twenty lakh women working under the Integrated Child Development Services, a UPA mass reach programme, will get free sarees designed by the National Institute for Fashion Design next month.

Updated on: Mar 28, 2010, 23:52:45 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Twenty lakh women working under the Integrated Child Development Services, a UPA mass reach programme, will get free sarees designed by the National Institute for Fashion Design next month.

The goodwill gesture is aimed at sending a message to women in villages across India that the government cares about them.

Anganwadi workers, mandated to implement the ICDS, are considered the face of the government at the village level.

“They are the central figures at the anganwadi centres due to their continuous contact with the village people, especially women,” said a women and child development ministry order asking state governments to provide free sarees to each anganwadi worker and helper.

“All anganwadi workers in a particular state will get two sets of sarees in a year of the same design and colour to make them feel they are part of the government,” said WCD minister Krishna Tirath.

Anganwadi workers are not government employees but they get a monthly honarium from the government for running the centres, which provide supplementary food and medicine to children under six.

The ministry will bear the cost of Rs 8 crore — Rs 200 for each saree.

“The sarees will provide them an identity,” an official explained, adding they would also get a name badge. Officials said the saree would be contemporary and different from what women wear in villages.

The ICDS is the world’s largest under-six child care programme. It works through a network of more than 14.5 lakh anganwadi centres.

After the women’s reservation bill, the move is another effort by the UPA to make women feel empowered.

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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