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Renuka Chaudhry Urges to Be More Humane Towards HIV Positive Children

by VR Sreeraman on Aug 1 2007 11:41 AM

Union Women and Child Development Minister Renuka Chaudhry today urged people to be sensitive towards children suffering from HIV/AIDS.

Addressing a seminar here, Chaudhry said: We are working towards meeting international norms on dealing with people affected with HIV/AIDS, Chaudhry said.

“But this may not be enough in itself to respond to the needs of each and every child who lives the life of risk or abuse, and even a child who is a victim of exploitation, unless the systems becomes more humane and are sensitive to these issues," she added.

Chaudhry further said that the Government has prepared an Integrated Child Protection Scheme (ICPS), which will essentially create a strong backbone at State and districts levels to prevent and respond to any form of child protection failures.

Under the scheme, all states and districts will have child protection units with a budget of over two billion rupees, she added.

In March this year, self help-group ‘Plan India’ took up the cause of paediatricAIDS in the country after cases of discrimination against children suffering from HIV/AIDS started cropping up.

They even launched special kits to generate awareness on HIV/AIDS with focus on stigma and discrimination through a variety of communication tools.

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These kits would enable help groups to reach out to greater audience and bring about a change in perception of the people towards HIV/AIDS as a manageable chronic illness rather than a taboo.

The approach behind the whole programme is to promote children as agents of change in the society rather than mere recipients, a point that Chaudhry stressed on.

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Apart from it, the ICPS is being implemented in five States – Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Andhra Pradesh with a budget of 900 million rupees.

The structure proposed for the ICPS scheme would include a team of 25 persons in the state unit and 10 officers in the districts level unit.

These units shall be provided support through various other programmes like Child Line Scheme that will help in reporting and tracking the progress of each child in the concerned district.

The Minister expressed hope that new child protection structure would adequately support children and families for better health, education and protecting rights of children.

Source-ANI
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