Belagavi district that is plagued by ills such as the Devadasi system is exploring new avenues of creating awareness about trafficking in child and women.
The zilla panchayat is tying up with non-government organisations to spread awareness among villagers about educating girls, motivating them to take up employment, and planning marriage at the right time.
Hyderabad-based My Choice Foundation and Belagavi-based Mahila Kalyan Samsthe will take up awareness programmes in 100 of the 506 gram panchayats in the district. These are panchayats in taluks such as Athani, Raibag, Chikkodi and Khanapur that border Maharashtra and Goa. A survey by the Ministry of Women and Child Welfare has indicated higher incidence of trafficking in women and child in these areas.
The awareness programmes will include street plays, film shows, door-to-door visits, meetings of women in public places and meetings of Anganwadi, ASHA workers and school teachers and gram panchayat workers.
A special counselling session will be held for boys and girls. They will be educated about trafficking and related issues and given tips about how to escape it, and also help their friends find a way out of it. Special training will be provided to members of self-help groups to communicate to officials and report such cases.
The programme will start from next week and end by March 2018. Teams of artists, resource persons and activists will spend three-four days in each gram panchayat depending on its size. “A report will later be sent to the government about this exercise,” said Surekha Patil, convenor of the Mahila Kalyan Samsthe.
“Our main focus is to tell people that it is a crime and has to be reported and stopped. Several people tend to think of it is a social issue that we have to live with. We want to make people realise that we can no longer live with it,” said zilla panchayat chief executive officer R. Ramachandran. The zilla panchayat is also organising sensitisation workshops for employees of gram panchayats, education and other departments to look for early symptoms of trafficking and stop them.
