The ministry of Women and Child
Development recently said that the administration of the national helpline for
children, known as Childline 1098, will be shifted from the Ministry of Women
and Child Development to Ministry of Home Affairs. This was announced by WCD
minister Smriti Irani on Monday, March 15, 2021 at a press briefing in New
Delhi.
The decision will mean that police
personnel will answer the 1098 calls instead of social workers as has been done
till now. This move has caused concern among non-government organisations and
child rights activists.
Bharti Ali, Co-founder of HAQ:
Centre for Child Rights in New Delhi expresses her views about this decision:
"Across the world, in
countries that seriously invest in children's rights, the first point of
contact for children is not the police, but a child protection agency. The
police will never get it right, however much you might train them because their
duty is law enforcement and law and order, not child protection. Even though we
want to bridge the gap between children and police, you need a bridge and that
bridge is a child protection agency. If the bridge falls, it will be mayhem.
Currently there is no real solid bridge, so the distance is met haphazardly,
through trial and error. Childline is not the bridge; it is only a chain or a
log in the kachchi puliya (uncemented temporary structure).
And if this too crumbles, we can imagine the future of children.
Even though children know when they
are in trouble they must call the police for help and they do call the police
on 100 when in need, they do not want every problem to be dealt the legal way.
Besides there are many issues that do not require legal intervention and for
which they would rely on something like the child help line. Sometimes it is
just venting for which the childline is used, which is not possible to do with
the police. Childline India Foundation’s website itself mentions that at times
they just receive prank calls (Visit https://www.childlineindia.org/a/about/childlineindia#:~:text=Subsequently%2C%20CHILDLINE%20India%20Foundation%20became,the%20centres%20at%20various%20locations). Such calls would certainly generate an angry response and may
land up a child in greater trouble.
If the intention to shift Childline
to the Home Ministry is to preserve data and ensure data security, the same can
be achieved even while the service rests with the Ministry of Women and Child
Development (MWCD), unless MWCD wants to suggest that their data is not
protected. That would be a serious concern and would demand course correction
rather than shifting of responsibility.
People, including children, who have used the Childline service or have had to deal with it directly have had varied experiences. There is no doubt that the quality of service needs to improve, which is only possible with adequate investment in the programme. Everyone is aware that the Home Ministry has more budget than the Ministry of Women and Child Development, but should that be the reason for shifting Childline to the Home Ministry? Shouldn’t the budget for MWCD be enhanced, considering that it was carved out as a separate Ministry in 2006 because a need was felt to pay due and focussed attention to child rights issues? Ideally there should be a separate Ministry for Child Rights per se as many countries have, but the proposal to shift Childline to the Home Ministry forces one to wonder if we are going to go back to the decade of the nineties, when issues pertaining to women and children were subsumed under different Ministries. One can only hope that the Ministry for Women and Child Development does not cease to exist!"