Kalaburagi’s ‘Mission Suraksha’ shows way in tackling child marriages

The state’s first-of-its kind initiative ‘Mission Suraksha,’ launched by the Kalaburagi district administration to prevent marriages of minors, sexual harassment and rape of minors, will soon be rolled out across the state.

The Directorate of Child Protection has issued a circular to implement the permanent mechanism to ensure that Karnataka is free from child marriages.

It has listed seven stages to be adopted for the success of the drive at various levels from anganwadis, schools, taluk and district levels.

Directions have been issued to district child protection units to form a pool of resource persons and master trainers to educate children.

The district administration has created a team of 450 government employees from 11 departments as master trainers under Mission Suraksha, which was launched in August 2023 to educate students about safe and unsafe touch by visiting schools.

Among the master trainers are police personnel, school teachers, lecturers, supervisors, counsellors in health and labour departments.

The campaign is being run with a zero budget as the expenditure will be met with by donors and volunteers.

District child protection officer Manjula Patil claimed that very less number of cases of minor marriages and sexual harassment used to be reported before the launch of the mechanism.

But Mission Suraksha has helped increase reportage. A total of 156 cases in 2023-24 and 159 cases in 2024-25 have been lodged through child helpline by students and parents after the launch, she said.

PowerPoint Presentations, charts and other images have been prepared to teach students about safe and unsafe touch.

UNICEF representatives have given proper training to them about ways and means to teach the students.

Officials said confidence-building measures among school children, taking steps to prevent sexual harassment cases and ensuring that the guilty are brought to book are the main objectives of the mission. 

The team has already conducted over 8,200 meetings with school children, parents and teachers in the last two years.

“We have launched Mission Suraksha to protect girl children as Pocso cases are high in the district. Earlier, sexual harassment and marriages of minors used to go unreported. Now, more children are coming forward to lodge complaints after awareness is created through training. We are also getting good response from parents,” deputy commissioner Fouzia Tarannum said.

Manjula Patil said master trainers had reached out to 3,01,898 students by organising the special drive in 2,198 schools out of the total 3,581 government, aided and unaided schools in the district.

They have conducted awareness campaigns about safe and unsafe touch in 2,527 of the 3,419 anganwadi centres and educated 78,288 children out of 1,05,830 students aged between three and six years, she added. The master trainers are apprising the teachers and parents not to take eve-teasing lightly as there is a possibility that the guilty persons will commit big crimes like rape if action is not taken against them.