No safe burial for kids below three

WCD Ministry asks state Govts to provide a safe burial for kids below the age of three, after a child was turned away from several crematoriums in Delhi.

Updated on: Apr 12, 2007, 20:52:12 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Women and Child Development (WCD) Ministry on Thursday asked all the state governments to provide a safe burial for kids below the age of three, after a child was turned away from several crematoriums in Delhi for burial earlier this week. "The officials at the cremation grounds turned the parents of the kid away saying there is no provision to bury a child in a crematorium," a WCD ministry official told HT.

Under Hindi rituals, children below the age of three are buried. The Municipal Corporation of Delhi admitted that there is no clarity at the crematoriums whether Hindu children below the age of three should be buried or cremated. "There have been cases were Hindu children below the age of three were cremated," an official said. The ministry was also informed that mostly children’s bodies are flown into Yamuna or buried on the banks of the river, in absence of adequate cremation grounds.

As the news reached the WCD ministry, officials started inquiry about the state of cremation grounds for children in Delhi. The MCD informed that of 268 crematoriums in Delhi there was only one for children in Delhi at Seemapuri. "We were told that it is in a bad state with no security provision. The dogs regularly monger there and had occasionally dig up bodies," an official said, explaining the sorry state of affairs of burial grounds for children in Delhi.

The WCD ministry on Wednesday telephonically contacted MCD, NDMC and DDA officials. "MCD officials indicated that there is no problem in obtaining land from the DDA for burial ground for children and money is not an issue," an official said. After this, Dikshit was contacted and she assured Chowdhury that soon a meeting would be called of officials to earmark adequate land for burial grounds for children in Delhi.

Following a positive response from Dikshit, the WCD secretary Deepa Jain Singh would soon write to other state governments to make a similar provision for burial of children.

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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