SHILLONG, Apr 18:
With reports of trafficking of children from the North East region, Union Minister for Women and Child Development Maneka Gandhi today said states have to appoint special ‘mahila’ protection officer in every village by year end who will act as link between the police and those in distress.
“There is enormous amount of trafficking of children going on from the North East. We find them in Kerela, Tamil Nadu and many are going to Malaysia, Thailand. It is not fair,” Gandhi said.
To cope with this, states have been asked to appoint a special woman police volunteer in every village by the end of the year, the selection and training of which will be done by the SPs, she said.
The job of a special woman police volunteer in the village is to keep tab on the village and see whether children are missing, women are getting beaten by husbands, or if girls are not sent to school, the Union Women and Child Welfare Minister said.
According to the minister, “In some states it will not be one woman but (in some) there could be a group of ten people with men also being part of it.”
Gandhi asked the NE states to examine the ‘Shaurya Dal’ model in Madhya Pradesh.
In the wake of such a model put in mechanism in MP, Gandhi said, “Crimes have come down hugely (there), the attendance in schools have gone up, the attendance of teachers in schools have also gone up. The mortality due to illness has got down.”
Gandhi said the number of trafficking by using trains is over 5 lakhs annually and her ministry has taken up initiatives to put up posters to prevent such criminal acts from taking place.
She said that panic buttons will be installed in mobile phones to ensure that women in distress get immediate responses and help from those in the vicinity.
Meanwhile, the Union Minister also stated that she has taken up with her counterparts in Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh the issue to stop trafficking of their children and women into India and elsewhere in the world.
“We have taken this issue very seriously. I had called a meeting with these countries last month in which all NGOs working on this and others in Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh came,” Gandhi said.
“We have another meeting slated later this month. We are telling each other what we can do. This month we are going to see that specific solutions will come into being,” she said. (PTI)
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