Raise child rights in House, politicos told

Visakhapatnam: Child welfare NGOs demanded all political parties to give preference to children’s problems. Bala Vikas Foundation, AP Alliance for Child Rights and UNICEF organised a district-level interface meeting with the politicians and demanded they give importance to education, health, equality and child protection.

The activists also asked the politicians to exert pressure on their parties to ensure that they raise children’s problems at least for one or two days in every session of Parliament.

Congress state legal services convener K. Shiva Kumar, TD state senior member and former APPSC member Prof G. Surya Narayana, YSRC state secretary John Wesley, Jana Sena executive member Usha Sree and CPM executive member Krishna Rao attended the meeting.

The NGOs asked them to build separate toilets for boys and girls with running water in schools, besides providing safe and clean drinking water. The representatives, on behalf of the children, asked them to provide fresh and nutritious food at all schools.

In the area of health, they suggested the politicians to adopt school health programmes.  Free sanitary napkin machines need to establish for the girl children in all the residential and non-residential girls schools and high schools, they said.

The NGOs said that AP has seen increase in the number of child labourers, as per the official statistics. About 60,038 children between the age group of 6 to 14 years were identified as working in the state between 2015 and 2017.

The existing Child Labour Act, 1986, which was amended with reference to the Right to Education Act, 2009 has to be implemented strictly to eradicate child labour.