Maneka discusses women, children issues in Facebook Q&A session

Union Minister for Women & Child Development Maneka Gandhi on Friday held a live Q & A session on Facebook for the third time to discuss issues like domestic violence, child labour and safety of women.

The session was aimed at getting a direct feedback on citizens' perspective on the schemes and policies pertaining to women and children.

According to an official release, the ministry received over 1,000 questions on the issues, which saw involvement of nearly 2,00,000 people. Gandhi answered the questions for about three hours and promised to answer the remaining queries soon.

She said that the questions posed by Facebook users were well-researched, implying a great degree of interest taken by them in the issues pertaining to the ministry.

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 and gender sensitisation, according to a statement.

The minister discussed various legal aspects of women and child rights, and elaborated on the various initiatives of the ministry, like One Stop Centres to help women in distress, training of women sarpanches, panic buttons in phones, 33 per cent reservation in police force, women volunteers in every village and several similar initiatives for women and children of the country.

On the issue of adoptions, Gandhi said: "Adoption of children is one of my passions in this ministry... Every time we get a complaint, we take action within an hour."

As per the statement, Gandhi said: "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 2,000 children in the system and about 9,000 parents waiting. We need more children to be brought in and I am constantly at it."

--IANS

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