Rs 4,500 cr plan for girls on the agenda

India’s first comprehensive scheme costing Rs 4,500 crore aimed at improving nutrition and skills of 8.5 crore adolescent girls will come up for the Cabinet consideration on Thursday.

Updated on: Mar 25, 2010, 24:11:38 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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India’s first comprehensive scheme costing Rs 4,500 crore aimed at improving nutrition and skills of 8.5 crore adolescent girls will come up for the Cabinet consideration on Thursday.

The scheme, called Rajiv Gandhi Scheme for Empowerment of Adolescent Girls (SABLA), under the women and child development ministry aims to provide food, health and develop vocational skill of girls in the age group of 11-18 years, 30 per cent of whom are malnourished.

“If implemented properly it can prevent anaemia,” said Dr Vandana Roy Mittal, Professor at Delhi-based Mulana Azad Medical College.

As per National Family Health Survey-3, 56 per cent married women below 50 years of age in India are anaemic.

Anaemia sets in due to nutritional deficiencies in adolescent girls. But, there is no government intervention for teenaged girls, while there are schemes for children in the 0-6 age group and married women.

“This scheme can act as nutritional bridge between girl children and women,” Mittal, a nutrition and child expert, said.

WCD minister Krishna Tirath has proposed to provide food to young girls through 14 lakh anganwadis in the country through an annual grant of Rs 3.8 lakh. The food ministry has already agreed to provide additional food grains for girls.

Along with food, the girls would be trained on how to become good “homemakers” and will receive education on life skills and vocational skills.

Another element of the scheme is educating girls about protection laws. “Poor married women face harassment as they are not aware about their rights. NGOs would be roped in to provide counseling,” an official said.

There are also provisions for counseling on reproductive health, pre-marital problems, healthy sex life, which includes personal health. The ministry aims at introducing the scheme from next financial year once the Cabinet approves it.

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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