Child Welfare Committee come to rescue of needy

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, May 24

The Child Welfare Committee, Chandigarh, has been making an effort to continue its work of providing care and protection to children in difficult circumstances of Covid-19 pandemic.

“Financial shocks and instability is one of the major causes of child labour, child marriage and child trafficking. Since Chandigarh has 20% population of internal migrants, we started a program called phone tree to find children facing food shortage due to loss of livelihood in the family,” said Sangita Vardhan, Chairperson, Child Welfare Committee. She further added, “The concept was based on two goals– directly helping children in need by providing dry rations and mobilizing community spirit transmission of fellow feeling to counter the fearful transmission power.”

In this pandemic time, the committee further planned to gather intelligence on child abuse or needy children via chain-calling system where each volunteer contributes. The process sis called ‘phone tree’. “It starts with one volunteer seeding his/her own phone tree by calling five people who may be in need. Every person called either gives more names of people in need or becomes a donor volunteer and motivated more people to donate dry rations. We have been able to reach 400 children and over 200 families who are provided with dry rations .We have found small children, pregnant hungry women, children living alone because parents have been stranded in village and most recently a child in a serious medical condition,” said Sangita.

The feedback from each phone group is sent to the district child protection society. Recently the phone tree claimed to have receive requests from Maloya residents that the EWS flats rents should not be charged for this difficult period. “We are forwarding the same to the social welfare department. Phone Tree has been working in Dhanas Flats, Dhanas Milk Colny, Kaimvala, Daria, Maloya village and Maloya EWS flats,” she added.

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During this unprecedented time, the committee has received four cases of sexual abuse/assault, one infanticide and four runaways, informed Sangita.