Minister for Social Welfare M.K. Muneer has said that the government will amend the Panchayati Raj Act to ensure that the ‘Jagratha Samithi’ in each panchayat ward meets regularly and works for protection of child rights.
He was inaugurating a day-long consultation on missing children organised by the Kerala State Commission for Protection of Child Rights here on Thursday.
Mr. Muneer said only the local-level vigilance committees could gather information about exploitation of and atrocities against children. In many instances, children ran away from homes owing to discord between their parents, he said.
Addressing the workshop, which was chaired by commission chairperson Neela Gangadharan, R. Sreelekha, ADGP (Special Services and Traffic), said figures available up to January indicated that 8,147 children had left their homes in the State. Of them, 7,559 were traced, almost half of them from orphanages or children’s homes. Of the remaining, many had been entrusted with relatives outside the State by their own parents. The police was able to reduce the backlog of such missing cases from 588 to just 47 this year. However, the absence of database of orphanages and welfare homes was a handicap in ensuring prompt action in such cases, she said.
Software developed by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) as part of the National Track Child Project was presented at the workshop by Subrato Roy Gupta.
