CHENNAI: The village-level child protection committees (VLCPCs), established to tackle issues like child abuse, labour, and early marriage by identifying and supporting vulnerable children at the grassroots level, remain largely inactive across the state.
Child rights activists say that meetings are often either not held or conducted as a formality, resulting in little to no impact. This inactivity is attributed to insufficient funds, inadequate monitoring at the district and state levels and lack of awareness among committee members.
Tamil Nadu has over 12,500 village panchayats. While it is challenging for the state to directly identify child welfare issues in every village, VLCPCs were created to address them in a decentralised manner. After the launch of the Integrated Child Protection Scheme (ICPS) in 2009, G.Os established child protection committees at village, block, and district levels between 2013 and 2015. A subsequent G.O. in 2020 formalised the VLCPC structure, comprising 14 members.
The panchayat president serves as the chairman, the village administrative officer (VAO) as the member-secretary, with representatives from the district child protection unit, Anganwadi workers, NGOs, police, and village health nurses. Together, they are tasked with safeguarding children from exploitation and abuse within their villages and have to meet at least once in three months.
TNIE spoke to eight panchayat presidents from various districts of which only one of them said meetings are being conducted at least once every three months in his village. The others either said they were unaware that such meetings needed to be held every three months or said officials not turning up as the reason for them for not holding these meetings.
According to activists, it is nearly impossible for child-related crimes to occur without the knowledge of the committee members. For instance, the panchayat president is generally aware of all village activities, while school headmasters are familiar with students at risk of dropping out, which is an indicator of vulnerability to child marriage or labour.
Despite this, many committee members don’t address these issues. Moreover, in some places, panchayat presidents choose to overlook them as it might negatively impact his votes.
“In training sessions, VAOs and panchayat presidents usually ask how they are expected to conduct these meetings without any funds. There should be some minimum fund allocated to cover the basic expenses for conducting the meetings instead of asking panchayat presidents to pay from their own pockets,” said P Jayashree, a social activist urging the government to allocate funds to conduct meetings and organise awareness programmes.