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New Delhi - Children in India are being wrongfully incarcerated with approximately 9,681 children found to have been wrongly held in adult facilities over six years from January 1, 2016 to December 31, 2021, a study by London-based organisation iProBono has revealed. This averages to over 1,600 children being transferred out of prisons annually. The study is based on the data received through research and government Right to Information (RTI) applications.
“For six years, I thought the jail would be the end of my life. I lost my childhood,” said Neha, a Child in Conflict with the Law…
On a hot summer day in June 2010, two Indian children upset with their parents for hitting them left home.
The siblings - 11-year-old Rakhi and seven-year-old Bablu - planned to go to their maternal grandparents who lived just a kilometre away. But a few wrong turns and they were lost.
It's taken them more than 13 years to find their way back - with a lot of help from a child rights activist - to their mother Neetu Kumari.
"I missed my mother every single day," Bablu who grew up in orphanages told me on the phone. "I'm very happy now that I'm back with my family.
A boy at Amragachi village in West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas will turn 17 on March 23, 2024. The teenager, however, is eagerly waiting for his next birthday in the year 2025, when he will turn 18 years old.
Rescued as a ‘bonded labourer’ from Chennai in February 2023, the boy often has a conversation with his father about his future. His father, a farmer with less than a bigha land, consoles him. “You may go to work when you turn adult,” the father tells the Class X student outside their small hutment that requires an urgent repair.
The boy was rescued, with 21 other…
More than four decades have passed, but Sayrun Nisa still cries for her son as if she lost him yesterday. In 1977, she had been taking care of her child and sick husband at home when there was a knock at the door. She opened it to find two people who claimed they were from Terres Des Hommes Netherlands (TDHn), an organisation that operated in the Dattapara camp for refugees of the Bangladesh war of independence, where she lived.
“They started telling…
Even though the prevalence of child marriage declined in India from 49.4% in 1993 to 22.3% in 2021, a …
NEW DELHI: The ministry of women and children development on Wednesday urged childcare institutions (CCIs) across to document the number of ‘care leavers’ and asked all state principal secretaries to verify the database and provide temporary shelter and vocational training.
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,…
Importance should be given to bringing up children in a family environment, Minister for Women and Child Development Veena George has said.
She was speaking after virtually inaugurating a two-day national workshop on ‘Deinstitutionalisation and family-based alternative care’ organised by the Women and Child Development department in association with UNICEF here on Tuesday.
The Minister said children’s community-based rehabilitation could become a success if all stakeholders worked together for it. “The State aims at being a role model for community-based child protection,” she said.
A parliamentary standing committee has expressed serious concern over the decline in the number of children coming to adoption agencies over the years, saying it points to trafficking or a thriving illegal child adoption market.
The committee on personnel, public grievances, law and justice tabled its report on the review of guardianship and adoption laws in Parliament in the recently concluded Monsoon session.
The committee stressed the need to increase surveillance, especially on unregistered child care institutions and adoption agencies/hospitals with the past record of trafficking.
Rohingya Muslims, who fled Myanmar to escape persecution by the Myanmar military, have found little security in India.
“I escaped from Myanmar and thought we would be safe here [in India],” said Zahoora Begum. “But there is no end to our miseries. We spend our days and nights in fear of detentions and attacks. We have grown up seeing miseries, but we never wanted our children to face the same.”
Zahoora, 25, lives in a makeshift camp at Kirana Talab area of Hindu-dominated Jammu in the Indian union territory of Jammu and Kashmir. She begins her day by feeding her brother’s three small…