SHILLONG: Raising alarm over large scale trafficking of young girls from the North East to the rest of the country, Union Minister for Women & Child Development, Maneka Gandhi, on Monday announced that women police personnel would be appointed in every village across the country to curb the menace of trafficking.
Speaking at the regional conference with North Eastern States on Child Adoption at the State Convention Centre here on Monday, she said woman police personnel would be selected and trained by the concerned superintendents of police.
“The woman police would keep a vigil in the village on any missing child or any case of women being assaulted,” she said, while referring to the concept of ‘Shaurya Dal’ where a group of people come together to stop trafficking and protect women in Madhya Pradesh have yielded positive results in prevention of crime against women.
She also a said that the ministry has put up a lot of posters against trafficking in railway stations since most of the trafficking in the country takes place through railways itself, while adding that a lot of women from the North East have been trafficked to Karnataka and even Malaysia and Thailand.
She also asserted that the ministry is trying to come up with a technology where a woman in distress can press a panic button on her mobile phone and immediately the message would go to 10 people in her vicinity.
According to the minister, the Union government has also launched a step up programme where funds are provided to NGOs who provide job based training to women even as she said that the ministry received more than 4000 applications for the programme, but unfortunately, many of them were sent by insurgent groups.
The Union minister also appealed to citizens to make use of the site called ‘Khoia Paia’ which is available across the country.
“The citizens can upload picture of a missing child or identify a child that looks homeless or trafficked or missing,” she said while claiming that over hundreds of children were found through the six-month-old site.
On the issue of high infant mortality rate, Gandhi said one of the reasons is lack of institutional delivery and urged all the states to improve the institutional delivery mechanism.
