States pulled up over child rights
Expressing serious concern over the state authorities’ lackadaisical approach towards the protection of child rights, the Supreme Court on Friday ticked the state governments for their apathy on twin issues — children falling in abandoned bore-well with alarming regularity and mismanagement of the orphanages.
On the question of children being trapped in abandoned borewells and many times it proving fatal, a bench, headed by Chief Justice of India S.H. Kapadia said “if this menace is not stopped we will take action (against state governments) and even ask the chief secretaries to explain.”
The warning came from the court after senior advocate P.S. Patwalia, assisting the bench in the matter, said abandoned borewells had virtually become “death traps” for the poor children in villages.
He said though the apex court had issued an order on February 11 to the states to follow the Centre’s guidelines regarding sealing or fencing the abandoned borewells, hardly any action was taken and as a result a minor child fell into one such well recently in Punjab and only could be brought out dead.
On the failure of the states to submit action taken reports on improving the conditions of orphanages, the apex court directed the states to file the reports on implementation of the National Human Right Commission guidelines on protection of the rights of children living there, within four weeks.
The CJI said if any state failed to submit the report, the chief secretaries or the law secretary of that state would be required to personally remain present on next hearing to explain the reasons.
The top court pointed out that only Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal had submitted the action taken reports on NHRC guidelines regarding improvement of the orphanages.
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EC gets 3 months on UP statues
Age correspondent
New Delhi
July 9: The Election Commission was allowed three months time on Friday by the Supreme Court to decide on the “maintainability” of a petition referred to the poll panel by it against the Mayawati government in Uttar Pradesh on its alleged violation of election laws.
A bench, headed by CJI S.H. Kapadia made it specifically clear that the EC will have first to look into the maintainability of the petition, filed by advocate Ravi Kant. He had questioned erection of the statues of “Elephant” in the “dalit” icon memorial parks by the Mayawati government. Mr Kant had alleged that this amounted to violation of the election laws by the UP government.
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