No child expert on welfare panel

The Govt tried to fast-track appointment of four members to the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights but couldn’t beat the election code of conduct. The poll panel will now have to approve the appointments, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Mar 9, 2009, 24:49:26 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The government tried to fast-track appointment of four members to the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights but couldn’t beat the election code of conduct. The poll panel will now have to approve the appointments.

Moreover, the women & child ministry’s choice of candidates — not one of them is a child psychologist — hasn’t gone down well with child experts.

Last Monday, the ministry, which for two years failed to appoint new members, got four names approved from the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and wanted them notified the same day. But, by the time the file reached Social Welfare Secretary K.M. Acharya, holding the additional charge that day, the elections had been called and the poll code was in place. “He (Acharya) asked the ministry to seek Election Commission’s approval,” a senior official, who didn’t wish to be identified, said. The poll panel is yet to approve the appointments.

Among the nominees are two lawyers — Anil Siwach and Charu Ali Khanna. Child right activists are upset as the commission will now have four lawyers but not one child psychologist. The present members, Sandhaya Bajaj and Deepa Dixit, too, are lawyers. “It is a commission for children not for the lawyers. There is not even a single member who is an expert on child psychology,” a child right activist, who didn’t wish to be named, said.

A financial consultant from Andhra Pradesh, Shreedhar Murty, who described himself as a social worker in the resume sent to the ministry, is the third nominee.

The fourth appointee, Seema Sadiq, like chairperson Sinha, is from civil society and runs an NGO.

“The government has the right to make appointments. But, we want to know the basis for such appointments,” said Raaj Mangal Prasad of NGO Pratidhi. Through an RTI application sent out six months ago, Prasad sought file notings on the appointments, but is awaiting response.

The ministry also decided to appoint J. Malaji, a district-level Congress worker from Karnataka, as member, National Commission for Women, in place of Nirmala Venkatesh. The appointment, too, has got stuck in the conduct code.

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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