WCD ministry to block funds to states

WCD ministry has threatened to hinder flow of central funds to those states failing to provide information about children to it immediately, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Published on: Feb 8, 2007, 02:40:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Call it a Nithari impact. The Women and Child Development (WCD) ministry has threatened to hinder flow of central funds to those states failing to provide information about children to it immediately.

The ministry is preparing an inventory of children in remand homes, with NGOs or other organisations or the ones, who are missing. But, it found the response of most of the states 'casual'. The states governments were recently asked to provide information about different categories of children.

In a bid to stir the states into action, WCD minister Renuka Chowdhury, has written to all chief ministers asking them to furnish the information. Or else, her ministry would be forced to slow down release of funds, she said, in the letter.

She also outlined the need for a national inventory on children for proper monitoring of schemes for welfare of children in remand homes, on streets and child labourers.

Chowdhury emphasised that the Centre is coming up with a new scheme —Integrated Child Protection Scheme (ICPS) — for all children and the data will ensure that the needy children are benefited.

The WCD ministry had earlier received flak from the Supreme Court and other agencies for failing to implement Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) properly. The reprimand was based on different UN reports stating that the malnutrition level of Indian children is even worse than the children in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Chowdhury is not willing to repeat the past mistakes. In the letter, she says, the ministry has received complaints against NGOs dealing with children but effective action is not possible in the absence of correct data. She has also asked the states to streamline its monitoring mechanism of implementation of schemes for children and funds allocated to NGOs.

Email Chetan Chauhan: chetan @hindustantimes.com

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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