Unicef works for better tomorrow for our kids

A new agreement between the Union Government and UNICEF promises to check violence against children and reduce the rate of HIV/AIDS among adolescents in the next five years, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Jun 9, 2008, 01:09:31 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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A new agreement between the Union Government and United Nation’s Children Fund promises to check violence against children and reduce the rate of HIV/AIDS among adolescents in the next five years.

To slow down the rate of infection of HIV/AIDS in the age group of 0-18 years, the programme plans to provide access to condoms to 70 million out-of-school adolescents and young people, and treatment to all identified HIV-positive infants.

The agreement signed between the Women and Child Development ministry and the UN is to help India to meet millennium development goals (MDGs) by 2015. India is lagging behind in meeting most of the MDG targets.

The UN will help the government set up child protection units in different states under the Integrated Child Protection Scheme, besides conducting studies on violence against children.

According to the Study on Child Abuse released in 2007, Indian children experience high level of abuse in schools. “The country programme for 2012 will collaborate with the education programme on promoting schools as zones of peace in unstable environments,” the agreement said.

Special focus will be on reaching out to SC/ST children, with emphasis on girls. “Strategies will be developed and norms set to ensure that SC/ST children can effectively complete secondary education,” the agreement said.

It also advocates a national policy on multi-lingual education to improve “transition rates” of socially excluded groups to higher education. In states, where gender gap in enrolment is more than 10 per cent, the UN plans to intervene and encourage girls to get enrolled in schools.

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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