A press release from the Ministry of Women and Child Development, Government of India recapped a series of new initiatives by the Ministry during 2015. The achievements relevant to children’s care are briefly described below and include the launch of the flagship programme Beti Bachao Beto Padhao for protection of the girl child; several initiatives to track, restore, and rehabilitate missing children; and adoption reforms and a new foster care system.
The Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (BBBP) programme is aimed at preventing gender-biased sex selection and ensuring survival, protection and education of the girl child. Another scheme, SABLA, was designed to provide life skills, supplementary nutrition and basic health check-up facilities for out-of-school adolescent girls. With respect to tracking and rehabilitating lost, missing and trafficked children the following steps were taken. The Ministry, with the assistance of Department of Electronics and Information Technology, has launched a web portal Khoya-Paya this year for reporting and searching missing children. The Ministry worked with the Ministry of Railways to institute Special Operating Procedures to be implemented by the railways for runaway, abandoned, kidnapped, and trafficked children. Child Helpline Centres at 20 major railway stations have been established to help restore such children to their parents or guardians. Lastly, Childline, a nation-wide initiative for assisting children in distressed conditions has extended to 386 cities.
The Ministry has taken steps for adoption reforms, including putting into effect the revised ‘Guidelines Governing Adoption of Children 2015’ and a new IT-enabled adoption system, CARINGS, which brings all the child care institutions of the country into an integrated system. Several new offences committed against children, which are so far not adequately covered under any other law, have also been made part of this law. These include: sale and procurement of children for any purpose including illegal adoption, corporal punishment in child care institutions, use of child by militant groups, offences against disabled children and, kidnapping and abduction of children. To streamline adoption procedures, the existing Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) has been given the status of a statutory body to enable it to perform its function more effectively. Lastly, a new system of providing foster care to children has been put in place and new guidelines have been issued, which permits children to be looked after by individual families as foster parents rather than in institutions.