By Our Reporter
SHILLONG: The State government has notified the idea of setting up the State Resource Centre for Women (SRCW) which will serve as a repository for all the entitlements to women in the state.
This parallel body of the state government which is a single window system for entitlements to women will be headed by the Chief Minister.
“As soon as this body comes into place, funds will be sanctioned on to bring about holistic empowerment of women”, Additional Secretary and Mission Director of the National Mission for Empowerment of Women, Ministry of Women and Child Development-Government of India, Nilanjan Sanyal said.
The SRCW will also prevent duplication of efforts while providing concrete services to the targeted women and will be modeled on engaging and converging with other departments for vocational training, better health, etc.
The State Commission of various North Eastern states which met at Pine Wood Hotel here on Tuesday and Wednesday has resolved to tackle the problems faced by the women in an enhanced manner by converging all resources, ideology and effort besides investing on human resources.
They have also resolved to strengthen the women folks by creating wide awareness on capacity building, continuous training and hand holding of government functionaries, joint trainings to ensure networking among departments improved inter-personal communication besides strengthening the Self Help Groups and formation of cooperatives, federations. Single toll-free helpline for all women related issues has also been thought about at the same time developing resource directories, updated and interactive websites. The State Commissions for women of the North Eastern states has also expressed the need to involve SHG (women’s group) with local authorities while implementing programmes for women.
The two-day workshop on convergence of women empowerment has also identified various problems faced by the women being trafficking, exclusion of women from local durbars, tribal laws not codified, inadequate use of social media. They have also identified many areas of concern being maternal mortality, infant mortality, child sex ratio and nutritional imbalance, impact of conflict on women in the region, substance abuse, broken families, early marriage, teenage pregnancy, trafficking, alcohol, unsafe migration and others.
Meanwhile, Meghalaya specific issues and challenges are mainly broken families, teenage pregnancy, and alcoholism besides others.