The Minister of Women and Child Development, Smt Maneka Sanjay Gandhi held the third Facebook session of Q&A today. The live chat, which began at 1:30 PM, aimed to get a one-on-one feedback on citizens’ perspective on the schemes and policies pertaining to women and children.
Over 1000 questions on issues related to the Women & Child Development Ministry were received, and it reached nearly 2,00,000 people. The Minister diligently answered the questions for about 3 hours and has promised to answer the remaining queries soon.
During the session, the Minister remarked that the questions posed by Facebook users were well-researched, implying the great degree of interest taken by them in the issues pertaining to the Ministry of Women & Child Development.
People were keen to know about the Ministry’s initiatives to establish safety for women and quality pre-school education for children, among other questions that ranged from Adoption, Violence against women, Harassment against elderly women to Child rights, Foster care, Gender sensitization etc.
The WCD Minister shed light on the various legal aspects of women and child rights, and elaborated on the several initiatives of the Ministry like One Stop Centres to help women in distress, Training of women sarpanches, Panic buttons in phones, 33% reservation in police force, Women volunteers in every village and several similar efforts for women and children of the country.
On the issue of adoptions, the WCD Minister said, “Adoption of children is one of my passions in this ministry and I have tried my best to streamline and professionalize the process so that it becomes less random, less corruption ridden and quicker. In fact every time I get a complaint, we take action within an hour. Please let me know how we can be better. I specially want children of an older age to be adopted and we have an exceptions committee that allows them to go through first to adopting parents”.
She added, “Every state has been asked to send in their children to be put on the list and practically no state has bothered to bring in the illegal, unregistered homes or orphanages into the system. We have at any given time about 2000 children in the system and about 9000 parents waiting. We need more children to be brought in and I am constantly at it”.
This was the 3rd Facebook Q&A session by Smt Maneka Sanjay Gandhi, through which the WCD Minister made a constant effort to hear out people’s concerns and also receive their valuable suggestions. The social media of Ministry of WCD has strived to give people a platform to express their grievances and give their feedback, and hence been ranked 4th on Facebook among other ministries. On Twitter too, the Ministry has fared well by reaching a significant number of followers.