Enormous calls made to Childline’s ‘1098’ toll free helpline service for vulnerable children of the society; seems do not reach to the volunteers. Currently, when residents of Hindipiri tried to organise a rescue for the child labour they received no response from the other end.
Government of India’s programme Childline- 1098- service was launched in Jharkhand on December 1, 2001to provide assistance to those children who do not have parental support and their families do not have dependable means of earning an adequate livelihood. The service was launched in states four districts — Ranchi, Dhanbad, Pakur and West Singhbum.
However, the people claim that the problem with the helpline service in existing from long time. Resident from Pandra (Ranchi) Sachin Kumar said, “I have stopped calling at the helpline number as nobody answers it. I have made several complaints in the past but no avail. The helpline worked well in the initial days but later over the years it stopped working.”
Interestingly, residents also complain that on making call from Ranchi, sometimes it gets connected to Patna Childline centre, who either handover NGOs number working for the welfare of unprivileged children or of local police station.
“Recently, when I called at the helpline to check whether it is functional or not, I found the call was diverted to Patna centre. The volunteer there produced me the local police station number,” said Ramshankar. The helpline is being managed by Xavier’s Institute of Social Sciences (XISS) College as nodal organization. According to the statistic provided by the institution as many as 29 unfortunate children has been rescued till date.
XISS College Director Ranjeet Toppo said, “Due to some technical glitch the calls get unanswered. We have written several times to Bhartiya Sanchar Nigam limited (BSNl) asking them to check the fault as soon as possible but no concrete response has been discovered from them yet.”
However, the institution has been also persuading to private mobile service operators pleading them to consider it as a free service for a social cause. “We are sailing from one office to another as no one pays attention to our plea. The institution is leaving no stone unturned to restart the malfunctioned service at earliest but it seems misty,” he added.
Meanwhile, the BSNl officers have blamed the overburdened work load the reason for missing out of their priority list. BSNl General Manager (GM) Om Prakash said, “The work pressure on us in past few years was too high that the problem went down on the priority list. We will address the problem soon.”