Delhi’s street children to get new home

The abuse that children begging on Delhi roads face during night may be over to some extent as they would have a home of their own soon, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Apr 28, 2007, 19:36:59 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The abuse that children begging on Delhi roads face during night may be over, to some extent, as soon they would have a home of their own.

Delhi would be one of the first states in the country to be covered under Integrated Child Protection Scheme of the Central government, initiated from the current financial year. The Women and Child Development Ministry has selected Delhi along with three other states to launch the scheme from mid-this year.

Finance Minister P Chidambaran allocated Rs 95 crore for the scheme in is first year and WCD officials expected the allocation to rise to Rs 2,000 crore by 2012, the end of the 11th five-year plan. "One state from northeast and one each from north and south India and Delhi would be covered," a ministry official told Hindustan Times.

The ministry expects the allocation to be made to Delhi by middle of 2007 once the Expenditure Finance Committee approves its proposal. Once that happens, the government estimates that Delhi would get a sizeable share from Rs 95 crore because of its 5 lakh street children, highest for any city in India.

Although not all the children would be covered the government intends to bring street children in central Delhi under the ambit of the scheme, that provides both financial and institutional protection to children. "There would be child protection officers in each district to look and investigate into complaints of violation of child rights," a ministry official said.

These officers would have powers to investigate the allegations of child right abuse by government agencies like police and social welfare departments. The mandate of these officers cover children, whose parents cannot take care of them, child prostitutes, destitute or abandoned children, children suffering with HIV/AIDS and children who are victims of crime.

The government will also allocate funds for construction of the "child shelter homes" having facilities for education and games for children. Explaining the idea behind these homes, a senior ministry official said, children would be welcome in these homes around the clock but no one would be forced to come here. The homes would be run by the NGOs with the help of WCD department of the Delhi government.

The first scheme of its kind in the country has been built with an idea to provide children a family environment for better future, the official said.

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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