New children’s right on anvil

Indian children, one of the worst suffers of violence in the world, will soon get a separate law to protect their rights, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Aug 26, 2008, 01:29:55 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Indian children, one of the worst suffers of violence in the world, will soon get a separate law to protect their rights.

The Home Ministry has asked the Women and Child Development (WCD) Ministry to draft a law to protect children against several offences, saying it would not be possible to insert child-specific provisions in the Indian Penal Code.

The Law Ministry had earlier asked the WCD Ministry to seek child-specific provisions in the IPC instead of bringing in a separate law. But the latter’s plea was rejected by the Home Ministry, which instead said there could be a law for children on the lines of the Domestic Violence Act for women.

In pursuance of this direction, the WCD Ministry has drafted a new law to protect child rights, which makes it an offence for parents and teachers to strike a child, if the child lodges a complaint. Checking sexual abuse and assault of children, as mentioned under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, is also an integral part of the proposed law. This includes clubbing vaginal and anal sex as a similar offence for defining punishment. A more comprehensive handling of sexual assault terms defines it as “any type of penetration (including sodomy) or manipulation of child's body for penetration”.

Oral sex and fondling a child with sexual intent have been defined and made punishable. This is the first time oral sex with a child, whether the child is forced to perform it on another individual or made to be the recipient of it, has been covered by law.

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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