Bunty’s pain eases a bit

Nineteen-year-old Bunty undergoes a weekly medical check-up and a doctor is on call 24 hours to look after him, in case of any exigency.

Updated on: Aug 5, 2009, 01:00:15 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Nineteen-year-old Bunty undergoes a weekly medical check-up and a doctor is on call 24 hours to look after him, in case of any exigency.

His life of hardships has smoothened a bit after HT reported he was being shunted from one child home to another for more than a year because he was over 18, the age for children to be kept in child homes.

Bunty is suffering from a heart ailment (a faulty valve) but doesn’t have the money to treat it. He doesn’t have a family or home. He’s living, temporarily, in a government home that initially didn’t want him and couldn’t provide him with the medical facilities he needed. Now, things are a bit better.

“He would be with us for the next five-six months and we are providing him with proper healthcare facilities,” said a senior official of Alipur, after-care home of Delhi government, where Bunty is living.

After the HT report, several social organizations had offered help to Bunty.

Deepalaya, a Delhi-based NGO for children, had offered to provide foster care to Bunty, if the government allowed it. However, the Alipur home official said the NGO had contacted them but are yet to meet him.

Tarana Khan, a Delhi resident, had offered to form a group of people to raise funds for the boy or seek help from an NGO. Another Delhiite, Amita Singh, wants children like Bunty be provided free medical check-up at top private hospitals.

Things may change for Bunty soon. The Delhi government has got a special grant from the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) to set up foster care centres for children living the life of prisoners in government homes.

“The SOS village and Delhi government has agreed to set up a foster care centre where single or destitute women would take care of children in need of care and rehabilitation,” said Deepa Dixit, a member of NCPCR, a body to protect rights of children in India.

Dixit said the foster care centres, if successful in Delhi, would be replicated all over the country to end the old age consent of children homes, which are like modern day prisons.

The NCPCR has already submitted a concept note on amending the Juvenile Justice Act to allow foster homes for children who are in conflict with the law, to the Women and Child Development ministry.

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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