SHILLONG, APR 18: Alarmed at the increasing cases of trafficking from the NE region, Union Minister for Women and Child Development Maneka Gandhi on Monday directed all the north eastern states to appoint ‘special women police officer’ in every village.
“There is enormous amount of trafficking of children going on from the North East. We find them in Kerela, Tamil Nadu, and many going to Malaysia and Thailand. It is not fair,” Gandhi said.
Stating that trafficking is on top of her agenda, she said, “The states have been asked to ensure every village has special women police officers, which will be chosen by the respective SPs and will be trained to handle such cases.”
“The job of the special women police is to be vigilant in the village and see that the children do not go missing, women are not beaten by husband, girls are sent to school, ,” the minister said.
She added states with vast areas will not have one woman police but a collection of ten people with men in it.
Gandhi was addressing the one-day Regional Conference with North Eastern States on the issues relating to Child Adoption held in the state capital on Monday.
The conference was attended by the ministers’ in-charge of Social Welfare and Women & Child Development of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura.
Asking the NE states to examine the ‘Shaurya Dal’ model in Madhya Pradesh where after their appointment, Gandhi said, “Crimes has come down hugely, 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. The institutional delivery has also gone up…”
Stating that the trafficking of girls and child wherein trains are used for their transportation is over 5 lakhs annually, Gandhi said her ministry has taken initiatives to put posters to prevent such criminal acts from taking place.
“It is time you take this seriously because the largest smugglers of children or largest devise used for smuggling children are railways,” she said.
She also said that panic buttons will be installed in mobile phones to ensure that women in distress get immediate responses and help not only from the police but from those in the vicinity.
“We are trying to put another devise on it which is not just the police but the message also goes to any ten people who are standing close or in the vicinity with the woman in distress. This device will also come into force,” she added.
Meanwhile, the union ministry also appealed to citizens to make use of the site called “Khoia Paia” which is available for the first time in whole of India.
“The citizens can upload picture of a missing child or identify a child that looks homeless or trafficked or missing,” she said while claiming that over hundreds of children were found through the six-months old site while the ‘tracked child’ which was there could not find anyone for 10 years.
On the issue of high infant mortality rate, Gandhi said one of the reasons is lack of institutional delivery and urged all the states to improve the institutional delivery mechanism.-By Our Reporter
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