BHUBANESWAR: One Nayagarh seems not enough for the State. Lack of any prudent and concerted follow up action by the apex PCPNDT committee has rendered the Pre-Conception Pre-Natal Diagnostic(PCPNDT) Act useless. The result is the Nayagarh syndrome is fast taking roots in the districts of western Orissa like Balangir, Kalahandi and Nuapada.
Speaking to this paper, Meenakshi Purohit, secretary, Kalyan and member of PCPNDT committee, Balangir, detailed how the Act is being violated in letter and spirit there.
“As per the PCPNDT Act, medical audit of form F is mandated. Form F is the key informer that lets the appropriate authorities detect the conduct of sonography for sex selection. A number of vital columns remains unfilled and the lack of audit let them off the hook”, said Purohit.
She said the district collector is the appropriate authority to conduct the medical audit but till date none has provided any data to the State-level PCPNDT committee.
And the PCPNDT committee seems content with the current level of implementation. “The mandated district task force and the district appropriate authority body hardly meets regularly. The importance of the meet lies in the fact that on the basis of information collected by the appropriate body, the district task force issues guidelines to conduct raids or take punitive action against the violators”, said Purohit.
She said despite flow of funds, the State-level PCPNDT cell did not pursue the programmes like training on tracking the cases.
Even very little awareness programmes were conducted for the ASHA and Anganwadi workers regarding the provisions of the PCPNDT Act.
Purohit said surveillance is totally non-existent. For this, many sonographers, to give a slip to the authorities, use portable machines and even, using vehicles, transport it to some other places to do the test.
She said the district appropriate authorities and task forces are the key players in detecting the crime. Police has not been authorised to take any action suo moto. Since police prosecutes the offenders under the IPC provisions, a proper liasoning between police and district PCPNDT cell is very essential.
“It is very unusual as the State-level PCPNDT Committee doesn’t have any representative from the police force despite the SPs being included at the district level PCPNDT cell. The result: Though the PCPNDT cell claims to have received 17 violation cases, only 5 were referred to the CB-CID so far”, Santosh Bala, DIG, crime, told the paper.
