Tuesday, June 28, 2022
First step of justice
| Case No.- 13140/24/71/2021-AD |
| NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION |
| (LAW DIVISION) |
| * * * |
| MANAV ADHIKAR BHAWAN, BLOCK-C, |
| G.P.O. COMPLEX, INA, NEW DELHI- 110023 |
| Fax No.: 011-24651332 Website: www.nhrc.nic.in |
| Date : 28/06/2022 |
| To, |
|
LENIN RAGHUVANSHI |
| Subject: Concluded and No Further Action Required(CLD) -13140/24/71/2021-AD. |
| Sir/Madam, |
| With reference to your complaint/intimation dated 22/05/2021. I am directed to say that the matter was considered by the Commission on 28/06/2022. The Commission has made the following directions: |
|
On 22.10.2021, the Commission took cognizance in the matter, as
the complainant had brought to the notice of the Commission a news
report wherein it was reported that a 18 year old vegetable vendor died
after he was caught over charges of defying Covid-19 lockdown norms and
mercilessly beaten by the Police Constable and Homeguard in Bangarmau in
Unnao District. The victim succumbed to the injuries. The report
further stated that both the police personnel had been suspended. In response to the directions of the Commission dated 11.04.2022, a report dated 02.06.2022 has been received from the Superintendent of Police, Unnao, Uttar Pradesh. It is informed that compensation of Rs. 5 lakh has been credited to the account bearing no. 731210510006355 of Smt. Nasima, mother of the deceased, on 25.05.2022. Proof of payment is also enclosed with the report. As the compensation has been paid to the mother of the victim, the case is closed. |
| This is for your information. |
|
Your’s faithfully Sd/- Indrajeet Kumar |
Friday, June 24, 2022
Young girls are our future and they need to be invested in!
Thanks Parul Sharma, 200 Swedish donors and People Vigilance Committee on Human Right (PVCHR) and JanMitra Nyas (JMN), today I have been talking about Sania.
Whose talent and courage I appreciate, as everyone knows that for the last two years, the Covid19 period has wreaked havoc on everyone, Sania is also tormented by that havoc, who wanted to become a teacher, but this lockdown broke his dream. Sania's father is an auto driver. And constantly got ill and his financial situation became very weak, somehow the family expenses can be met. Sania has 4 brothers and sisters & Sania is the eldest.
She has passion but the money was not managed but her hope gave her a chance to study by connecting her to Rajdulari scholarship. When she got a check of 7900 from the institution, her happiness knew no bounds. The story is in front of you, and salutes you with such passion.
Making her success as role model for single mother
Nandani Yadav is studying in class 12th in Sudhakar Women's Intercollege Pandeypur in Varanasi. She is the daughter of a single mother who faced domestic violence and is living in a rented house at Satsang Nagar Colony, Benipur Pokhara. Nandani has four sisters and one brother. Nandani wants to study and wants to become a Police Inspector. Nandani’s father had done two marriages. Her mother Abha Devi is the second wife. Her father had died in the year 2017. Due to the absence of his father, when his mother went to his in-laws' house, he had to be a victim of domestic violence there.
Her mother visited the PVCHR for her case of domestic violence. PVCHR supported her. Her mother is earning for household expenses by cooking and stitching clothes.
When her father was alive, he had a four-wheeler vehicle, which he used to drive. But after the death of her father, the car was sold by the sons of his first wife. So, her mother became completely helpless and the financial condition of her mother got worse and the daughters started having trouble in continuing their further studies. During her case her mother talked to Shruti ji about financial difficulties in study of her daughters, then PVCHR connected with Rajdulari scholarship scheme and now since last four years Nandini and her three sisters are being helped by JMN/PVCHR, Parul ji and 200 Swedish donors. Nandani dreams that she will become a police Inspector for bringing justice to the poor in general and women in particular. She is looking to illuminate the name of her mother so that people in the society get the inspiration that even a single woman can educate her children and make something happen.
A
story of girls’ resilience for better world
Ankita Gupta is a resident of village panchayat Kotwa police station Sarnath, Varanasi. She is pursuing BCom. There are a total of six people in her family, out of which there are four sisters. Ankita is the eldest. Because of this, Ankita also has the responsibility of her sisters. Her Mother and Father have a small grocery shop and work together. After the hard work of both of them, they hardly managed livelihood of their family in some way. Inflation and hard times due to the lock down in COVID created a financial crisis for common people, but his father is managing the family. Seeing her father's financial condition, Ankita had thought that she would study only till class XII, and after that she would help her father by doing a job. But let me tell you that Ankita had a dream that she would do B. Com and do a job in the bank. But due to lack of money, she thought of sacrificing her dream.
Then one day Ankita's father had heard that there is Anand ji in his village who works in People Vigilance Committee on Human Right (PVCHR), where helpless people are helped. So, her father hesitantly asked Anand ji one day, then Anand connected Ankita to the Rajdulari Scholarship Scheme and today Ankita is doing B.com for the third year. Now she is thinking of taking admission in M.Com. Ankita has been getting a scholarship for the last three years. Now Ankita is slowly reaching toward her dreams. This has been possible only because of JMN/PVCHR, Parul ji and 200 Swedish donors.
Report is prepared by Jyoti Kumari, coordinator Youth Forum at PVCHR who completed her post graduation with support of same scholarship
#PVCHR #JMN #Scholarship #GirlEducation #GirlsPower
Wednesday, June 22, 2022
Consequences of abolishing child labour could be many, but a strict ban is important: Shruti Nagvanshi on strictly enforcing the Child Labour Act
Apart from mentioning that the authorities must expedite the rescue operations to prevent child labour, the women’s and child’s right activist also talked about the current reality of the Varanasi carpet industries and the consequences of abolishing child labour.
Going by the data from Census 2011, India had 10.1 million child labourers, including 5.6 million boys and 4.5 million girls. While it is self-explanatory that the 11-year-old data does not stand exactly true to the current time, the COVID-19 pandemic can surely be seen as a contributing element to the increased number. But can only strictly abolishing child labour be the solution to the problem? On the occasion of World Day Against Child Labour, Shruti Nagvanshi, a women’s and child’s rights activist, got candid with Molshree about her views. One of the founders of the People’s Vigilance Committee on Human Rights (PVCHR) based in Varanasi, Nagvanshi, and her team have been active in working for the health and rights of children in their district. Here is an excerpt from the interview where she talked about preventing child labour and the consequences of abolishing child labour in India.
The existence of child labour was persistent even before COVID-19 and as it was during the pandemic too. The solution is also similar in that the children should compulsorily be engaged in the education sector and with the social beneficiaries schemes. Secondly, it is important to speed up the process of rescue operations to help those who have already fallen into the trap. Thirdly, the rehabilitation centres need to ensure admitting rescued children for their development. The Act, the rules, and the bodies have already been there, but it is high time that all of these expedite the rescue operations for the already existing child labourers.
There is yet another mindset among the institutions and the civilians that if a child chooses to work, it should be left to them to decide, which is not right. It is important to understand that even if they are working by choice, it is further going to impact their growth. Moreover, the government needs to ensure that the labourers’ family members are employed so that their children do not have to work.
On an individual level, we can stop giving benefits to a child in return for work. Oftentimes, we offer our house helps an option of additional income if they bring their children and do stuff like cleaning and washing, and that needs to stop.
What about those children who lost their parents to the COVID-19 and have no means of livelihood?
The government of various states are taking care of the needs of those children who lost their parents in the pandemic. Even the government of Uttar Pradesh, with the intervention of the Supreme Court, are helping those children under special schemes. The only task is to get these children into such schemes.
However, the major problem observed is that the children are asked to produce the death certificates of their parents from the hospitals that must state the reason to be COVID-19. Many people from economically poor backgrounds could not afford the hospitals and passed away in their homes, and their children do not have those certificates. On the other hand, the lower-middle-class or the children, who are comparatively in a better situation, could produce the certificates, but they do not need the benefits of the schemes since their kins are taking care of them.
Hence, the needy do not have the certificates, and those who have, are in no need of the benefits, it becomes an utmost priority to discover those children and register them under an institution.
Do you think that the government will be able to provide employment opportunities to all the families of child labourers immediately after the abolishment?
Honestly, no. But the good thing is that the government is running various skill development initiatives to aid in the financial stability of the families of child labourers. Only when the parents are skilled and can earn for their families, child labour would be able to stop. Parents can opt for loans, but the problem is that they will be unable to pay the high-interest charges.
In addition, banks also hesitate to give it to the people belonging to the economically poor section. But it can’t be used as an excuse to not abolish child labour completely. It has to be the prime focus of the government bodies, and it needs to be strictly enforced.
Talking about the ban, what according to you will be the social consequences of strictly scrapping child labour in India?
When a child starts earning at an early age, they get used to the money, and if that is suddenly stopped, it might make them anxious and desperate for money even more. As little of a problem as it seems, the parents of the children will have a hard time dealing with the situation. The consequences of abolishing child labour could be many, but a strict ban is important.
Given that child labourers aid in the family income and support various small and large businesses, What according to you will be the economic consequences?
It will affect the family income in the initial days. The situation of businesses and industries that use children will not become worse and the reason is that these industries are bound by their nature to get more work for less amount of money. The sole reason for involving children is that they could pay them lesser than usual and get more from them, but that does not necessarily mean they cannot pay more to the skilled labourers. It is just the tendency to keep up with the minimum costs in production.
Even the small businesses that might appear unable to pay any adult and only hire children to keep their margin of profit in this process. It’s not that they cannot pay, but they want to spare the profits by indulging children in labour. Recently, what we have observed is that the Banaras carpet industries have allowed workers to take the work home. Now, it might look helpful for the labourers, but in actuality, it is an indirect way through which children get involved in the work. We came across labourers delegating their work to the children of their houses. Even if someone complains and the authorities go on checking the houses, their children are trained to get up and slip out of their places. So, in no way, businesses are or ever will be in an adverse situation unless they stop using such tricks.
How can the nutritional demands of the children be ensured after banning child labour?
The only way out is to put the children under an institution; government, non-government, or any social beneficiary initiative, so that all of their requirements can be taken care of by such bodies.
To prevent the social consequences, it is important to help parents understand the importance of education. We have observed that people belonging to some castes considered higher in the society, even if poor, have started going to all extents to educate their children, including their girl child. However, visiting the houses of people belonging to the other caste has often led us to come across their children working while the parents choose to sit and rest. They still need to understand what is beneficial for their children. So, it is not a matter of being casteist but stating the observations.
Tuesday, June 21, 2022
Tuesday, June 14, 2022
Monday, June 13, 2022
Death of Innocence
“There is a gender bias. The woman will be subjected to ill-treatment if her brother elopes with a girl while the brother of the girl will be spared of the barbs. Why is this? This shows the patriarchal mindset where there are two sets of rules for boys and girls. This biased approach leads a woman to commit suicide as she is vulnerable in this male-dominated society,” Lenin Raghuvanshi of People's Vigilance Committee on Human Rights (PVCHR) said.
Gender bias is an inherent characteristic of a patriarchal society - it is a form that demeans women in a variety of ways. “Patriarchy is a system of social structure and practices in which men dominate, oppress, and exploit women. The male-dominant Indian society makes its women habitual of this discrimination. As a result, most women fail to understand their own rights and freedom”, Raghuvanshi said
“Unfortunate part is Indian women have accepted their subordinate position to men and are also part and parcel of the same patriarchal system,” he said.
https://www.dailypioneer.com/2022/sunday-edition/death-of-innocence.html
According to the recently released data by the government's National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 22,372 housewives took their own lives last year - that's an average of 61 suicides every day or one suicide every 25 minutes, writers Biswajeet Banerjee
May 24, 2022, Bacchor, Baghpat,
Uttar Pradesh:
A mother and her two daughters consumed poison when police raided their house. The police were looking for her son, who had eloped with a neighborhood girl. For the last one week, the police along with the girl’s brothers frequently visited the woman’s house, sometimes at odd hours. The last time when the girl’s brothers had come, they threatened to rape the girls if they do not reveal the location of the boy. That day, May 24, the police raided the house again when there was no male member present. The woman did not open the door. But the police along with the girl’s brothers managed to enter through the backyards. When the woman saw the police with the brothers of the girl, she along with her daughters aged 18 and 16 drank poison and committed suicide.
May 25, 2022, Dudi, Jaipur, Rajasthan
Three sisters, two of them pregnant, walked with a 4-year-old toddler and a 24-day infant for four-kilometer in the scorching heat. These three sisters, aged 27, 23, and 20 years respectively, were married to three brothers, who were well off. The sisters were frequently beaten up. The eldest of these three sisters, who was a post-graduate in Mathematics, tried three to four times to return to her father’s house. As the father was poor, he cajoled her to go back to her in-laws. She returned with the hope that the situation will improve. One fine morning in mid-May, she was again beaten up by her husband. She was admitted to a hospital in Jaipur for eight days. When she recuperated, the three sisters decided to end their lives to escape from the routine bashing by their husbands. “We do not want to die … we want to live. But cannot live in this situation,” the youngest of the sisters wrote in her WhatsApp status. The three sisters, along with two kids jumped into the well and committed suicide.
The two incidents, which took place a day apart in two different states ruled by two different political parties, highlight the dominance of a patriarchal society where women are beaten up at the drop of the hat and are made to live a life no better than animals. “Women suffer in silence. In Indian society, the women take the bashing by husbands or other male members of the family as their bhagya (fate). When the torture crosses the limit, these women decide to end their lives,” Nomita P Kumar, an Associate Professor of Giri Institute of Development Studies (GIDS), Lucknow said.
A recent government survey claims that women were frequently forced to commit suicide as they had faced spousal violence. There is no secret that the daily drudgery can make marriages oppressive and matrimonial homes suffocating. This exactly had happened in the case of the three sisters of Rajasthan. They were subjected to physical abuse on one pretext or the other. In 2018, the eldest of these three sisters registered a case of dowry harassment and domestic violence against her husband and in-laws at the local police station. She withdrew the case after a compromise between her in-laws and her father.
These three sisters were married to three brothers in 2015. The sisters were educated—the eldest a post-graduate in mathematics, the second one a Graduate, and the youngest one and the youngest doing her B.Ed. In contrast, their husbands were illiterate. “As the girls were more educated than their husbands this could be a possible reason for friction between them as there are reports that these women were forced to cook in firewood oven despite the household having an LPG connection. The other friction point could be that father of these girls was poor and they did not bring enough dowry,” Kumar said and added: “Women are really resilient, but there's a limit to tolerance”.
According to the recently released data by the government's National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 22,372 housewives took their own lives last year - that's an average of 61 suicides every day or one suicide every 25 minutes. Housewives accounted for 14.6 percent of the total 153,052 recorded suicides in India in 2020 and women account for more than 50 percent of the total number of suicides.
The rate of suicide in India is so high that women in India accounted for 36 percent of global female suicide deaths in 2016, a study in The Lancet Public Health said. It further said that women between the age group of 15 and 29 years account for the maximum number of suicides in India. The authors of this study speculate that these suicides may be related to a conflict between women’s increasing education and empowerment and the persistence of their lower status in Indian society.
But sometimes, it is the societal fear and stigma that forces women to end their lives. In the Baghpat case, humiliated by a police raid after weeks of alleged harassment, the mother, 45, and their two daughters, aged 18 and 16, killed themselves by consuming poison. She belonged to the OBC caste. The girl who eloped with her son Prince belonged to the Dalit community.
On May 2, the boy, 22, and the girl 19 eloped. The FIR was lodged on May 4. This started days and weeks of harassment. The father was first taken to a police station and was detained for two days where he was beaten up. They asked only one question - where were his son and the girl. A few days later, police started raiding their house. The police used to come with the brothers of the girl. The brothers even threatened to take two daughters of the women with them and rape them.
“We were scared because the brothers of the girls had repeatedly said that they would take my daughter and keep them at their house till the eloped couple returns. They even threatened to rape them. My wife was so scared that she stopped going out. Even she stopped the daughters to move out of the house because some boys of their own caste passed comments about their brother being eloped with a Dalit girl,” the father of the daughter, who is a menial labourer, said.
He said that his wife was in such a trauma that she used to say who will marry their daughters now. My daughters were also scared of the way the police and brothers of the girl behaved with them. They used to say it is better to die than to live with this kalank (blot). Fearing the social stigma my wife committed suicide with two daughters.
“There is a gender bias. The woman will be subjected to ill-treatment if her brother elopes with a girl while the brother of the girl will be spared of the barbs. Why is this? This shows the patriarchal mindset where there are two sets of rules for boys and girls. This biased approach leads a woman to commit suicide as she is vulnerable in this male-dominated society,” Lenin Raghuvanshi of People's Vigilance Committee on Human Rights (PVCHR) said.
Gender bias is an inherent characteristic of a patriarchal society - it is a form that demeans women in a variety of ways. “Patriarchy is a system of social structure and practices in which men dominate, oppress, and exploit women. The male-dominant Indian society makes its women habitual of this discrimination. As a result, most women fail to understand their own rights and freedom”, Raghuvanshi said
“Unfortunate part is Indian women have accepted their subordinate position to men and are also part and parcel of the same patriarchal system,” he said.
This is evident in the Rajasthan incident. The mother-in-law of the three women remained a mute spectator as her sons tortured their wives. “Sab bhagya hai (it is all destined)”, she uttered as police arrested her three sons.
(The writer is Political Editor, The Pioneer, Lucknow)
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