Precarious family milieu forces children to homes

Why is it in the news?
    • A pan-India study conducted under the aegis of the Women and Child Development Ministry shows that most children at childcare institutions are not orphans, but belong to family structures that are unable to look after them.
    • The family structure such as those that are headed by unwed mothers, abandoned wives, widows and in some cases single fathers.
 
More in the news
  • The study records a total of 9,589 shelters across the country.
  • These include shelters for children who are in need of care and protection such as those who don’t have a home or parents as well as children in conflict with law or those who have been accused of or found to have committed a crime.
  • The survey found more than 3.7 lakh children housed at these centres.
  • According to the report, children of single parents constituted a third of the total number of total children in homes, accounting for 1,20,118 children.
  • This number is more than double that of children orphaned, abandoned and those surrendered by their parents at 41,730, 7,677 and 6,791 respectively.
Poor follow-up
  • The Juvenile Justice Act (Care and Protection of Children), 2015, lays down that sending children to an institution should be the last resort and that they have the right to be re-united with their families at the earliest.
  • However, certain findings of the survey raise questions about the efficacy of shelters in trying to restore children to their families.
  • The Act requires that a child brought to a home be produced before a Child Welfare Committee (CWC) within 24 hours.
  • The CWC then declares the child abandoned, surrendered or orphaned.
  • According to the report many child care institutions (CCIs) recorded a poor rate of producing a child before the CWC, ranging from no such cases in Manipur through 17% in Kerala, 32 % in Uttar Pradesh to 48% in Sikkim and 50% in Uttarakhand.
  • Only 19.3% of CCIs made an effort to trace the biological parents of a rescued child.
Source
The Hindu.



Posted by Jawwad Kazi on 5th Jan 2019
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