In view of the recent case in which a 15-year-old girl fled away in broad daylight from a quarantine centre at Balika Niketan, the chairperson of the State Commission for Protection of Child Rights (SCPCR) Usha Negi said that the number of police personnel should be increased in such places for the safety of the children and staff staying there.
Negi visited the quarantine centre at Balika Niketan on Tuesday to inspect the management there and found out that the present security provided there is not sufficient. According to her, there should be at least three women police personnel working in an eight-hour shift to provide security to the children.
Besides this, Negi also expressed her disagreement about keeping the new and old children together in the quarantine centre. Since the quarantine centre has only one hall, she suggested making a temporary partition in the hall to manage the new and old children separately. Negi also instructed the staff to take care of these children in such shelter homes like their own. She said that it is not just a duty of the staff but also a moral responsibility to make the lives of such children better because if the life of one child gets destroyed, it also ruins the lives of several other children.
Informing about the reason for the teenage girl fleeing on July 24, Negi said that the girl made some mistake in the quarantine centre and thought that she could probably be punished by the caretaker so she ran away under the pretext of using the washroom. Negi said that the girl accepted that she made a mistake by running away from the centre but she also mentioned during her counselling that now she wants to stay in Balika Niketan to continue her studies.