Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit on Saturday launched an ambitious scheme under which nearly 14 lakh school children in the city will be provided free medical treatment and health check-ups by the Delhi government.
The scheme was announced by Ms Dikshit while presenting the Delhi government’s budget for 2011-12 in March with a corpus fund of `100 crores set up for the scheme’s implementation.
“It is a very unique scheme which is aimed at ensuring better health for students studying in government schools,” Ms Dikshit said while launching the scheme at a function here.
The “Chacha Nehru Sehat Yojana” aims to provide universal and free healthcare to children up to the age of 14 years.
“The future of the country depends very much on the children and to have quality human resource, we must invest on the health of our children,” Ms Dikshit said.
“Through the scheme, we want to make all school children healthy which will result in making of a healthy society and healthy nation,” she said.
The scheme was launched on the 94th birth anniversary of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in New Delhi.
Initially, the scheme will be implemented in 100 schools and later it will be extended to the remaining 854 government-run schools.
Under the scheme, the government will prepare comprehensive health profile of all the school children and will keep them in an electronic format.
Health minister A.K. Walia, while addressing the function, said his department had already enhanced infrastructure to implement the scheme.
Education minister Arvinder Singh Lovely, noting that education was a priority area for the city government, said there would not be any shortage of resources to ensure better facilities to school children.
Ms Dikshit has already instructed the health department to ensure that the proposed health check-up includes medical testing of all possible diseases as well as providing immunisation, if required.
Officials said around 117 teams, each consisting of a doctor, nurse and computer data entry operator, have been formed and each team will screen around 60 children in a day.
Mr Walia said apart from free general check-up, the government will also take care of children suffering from various diseases, besides providing free medicines.