Women and Child Development Ministry to look at infra lapses in child care homes

Reports from a real-time portal of the government to monitor child care homes across the country will be used to make budgetary changes, if any, in case there are infrastructural lapses.

The move follows a directive from Union Minister for Women and Child Development Smriti Irani, who had asked child rights body National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights to carry out a study of infrastructural lapses in child care homes.

Priyank Kanungo, NCPCR chief, told DH that to keep a track of any infrastructural lapses at the care homes, the child rights body will depend on the Monitoring App for Seamless Inspection (MASI) portal. DH had earlier reported that the portal, launched in December last year, has over 6670 child care homes registered on the platform, and 4000 inspections have been done till now.

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“We will analyse the information that we gather on the MASI platform and prepare a report when the budgetary recommendations are being collected,” Kanungo said.

As per Section 27 of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, it is mandatory to have at least one Child Welfare Committee per district, which has the mandate to take decisions in cases relating to the care, protection, treatment, development and rehabilitation of children in need, and look at the requirements for providing for their basic needs and human rights protection.

The guidelines for Mission Vatsalya, the ministry’s section for child welfare policies, state that the ministry will provide financial and infrastructural support to states and UTs to set up CWCs in children’s homes in each district. Each child care home should have a minimum space of two rooms each spreading across 300 sq ft set aside for CWCs.

The ministry said that when the child care home has space for the CWC, it will provide for it. But in cases when it does not have the requisite space, or if there is no children home in a district, the ministry will provide funding under Mission Vatsalya to construct or rent a suitable space. An amount of Rs 9.25 lakh will be provided to construct the CWC building.