Renuka’s ministry gets charge of checking foeticide

Receiving flak for not been able to enforce the Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act to check female foeticide, the Health Ministry has agreed to transfer enforcement of the law to Women and Child Development ministry, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Sep 10, 2008, 01:06:45 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Receiving flak for not been able to enforce the Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act to check female foeticide, the Health Ministry has agreed to transfer enforcement of the law to Women and Child Development ministry.

A senior WCD ministry said they had sought transfer of the subject during its consultation with the Health Ministry on enforcement of the law. “We are yet to receive a formal approval from Cabinet secretariat on the transfer,” a senior ministry official said.

Once the subject is transferred, ministry officials said the NGOs would get a bigger role in reporting cases of use of ultra sound machines for female feticide.

The Health Ministry had received flak for not being able to enforce the law effectively. Once its enforcement is transferred to the WCD ministry, officials said, the focus would change from it being a health issue to a social issue.

“In most states, enforcement of the law is seen more as registration of ultrasonic machines with the government rather than a social problem,” a ministry official said.

The transfer will also have an impact on state governments, which enforce the law. Instead of Health departments, the law would be enforced either by Women and Child development departments or Social Welfare departments. “To make it a mass movement we want to involve NGOs and civil society in its implementation,” an official said.

India’s girl child sex ratio in the age group of zero to six had declined from 945 in 1991 to 927 in 2001. The ratio in Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Chandigarh, Uttaranchal, Haryana, Delhi, Rajasthan, UP, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Daman and Diu is poorer than the national average.

Interim studies on child sex ratio in different states have indicated that the situation has not improved much with proliferation of clinics specializing in conducting sex determination tests.

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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