9 states, UTs to directly run integrated child helplines from month-end

Almost nine months after the Union ministry of women and child development (WCD) wrote to states asking them to integrate the Child Helpline (1098) with the telephonic short code 112 and to link them to district child protection units, officials said that nine states and UTs will have the integrated system by June-end.

Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Goa, Ladakh, Mizoram, Puducherry, Dadra & Nagar Haveli, and Daman & Diu are the states where the childline will be run by the government. Fourteen more states are going to integrate the system by July-end.

Under the Child Protection Services Scheme, which has been renamed Mission Vatsalya, the ministry was supporting the 24x7 helpline Childline 1098 service through the Childline India Foundation (CIF) and over 1,500 partner NGOs. The service was available in 568 districts, 135 railway stations, and 11 bus stands through a network of more than a thousand units.

However, the WCD ministry decided last year that the helpline would be run in coordination with state functionaries, including police and counsellors, in conjunction with the Emergency Response Support System 112 helpline of the ministry of home affairs (MHA).

The move had drawn flak from child rights activists, who contended that the police running the system might not be advisable for children and that a single-line emergency response might not be advisable.

However, ministry officials said that the response time for distress calls by children to CIF was 60 minutes.

“The current system, however, lacks interoperability with other services like police, fire, and ambulance, which leads to the loss of precious time in distress situations. The CIF network could cover only 568 districts, leaving almost 200 districts uncovered. So, the government decided to integrate the Child Helpline with ERSS-112 so that the responsibility of the administration towards children is taken over by a responsible and responsive administration,” an official of the WCD ministry said.

While the CIF ran the system through six centralised call centres (CCCs) in Kolkata, Gurugram, Bengaluru, Chennai and Mumbai, ministry officials said the new system will have 36 control rooms with one in each state.

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) will run the system. NIPCCD, railways and NIMHANS, in collaboration with state training institutes, will train the staff, officials said.

Over 2000 adoptions since amendment

Since September 2023, when the amended rules of the Juvenile Justice Act came into effect, over 2250 children have been adopted within the country, which includes 135 children above the usual age of adoption. Apart from that, there are 139 pending cases which are awaiting an adoption order which, ministry officials said, was a climbdown from the 997 cases that were pending in September 2022, when the amended Juvenile Justice Act came into force.

The amendment empowers the district magistrates by allowing them to issue adoption orders and not courts which was the case. The move has courted criticism from some states who contend that DMs have too much on their plate, and the Bombay High Court granted an interim stay on the transfer of the pending adoption matters from the courts to the DMs and directed the courts to continue adjudicating such cases. As a fallout, as many as 350 cases are pending in Maharashtra.