BackNumber of calls serviced by Childline 1098 doubles in a year
Calls serviced by the a toll-free, 24x7 emergency phone outreach service for children in distress went up from 4.51 million in 2014-15 to 9.83 million in 2015-16
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New Delhi: The total number of calls serviced by Childline 1098—a toll-free, 24x7 emergency phone outreach service for children in distress—more than doubled from 4.51 million in 2014-15 to 9.83 million in 2015-16. Childline is run by Childline India Foundation, a non-governmental organisation recognised by the ministry of women and child development (WCD) as India’s national emergency helpline for children, and currently operates in 400 cities across the country.
As of March 2016, Childline has serviced over 50 million calls with direct interventions made in over 5 million cases since the service was first launched in 1996. Direct intervention—cases where Childline teams physically reached, rescued, provided SOS intervention and linked them to institutions for long-term rehabilitation—was done in over 250,000 cases in the 12 months ending March 2016.
“The increase in number shows people’s growing trust in us. Currently we are receiving around 40,000 calls per day and our aim is to expand Childline’s reach till the grassroot level," said WCD minister Maneka Gandhi.
The number of children and concerned adults contacting Childline went up from seven-eight lakh per month to 1.03 million in March, which further increased to 1.1 million calls in April. The increase follows a joint initiative by the ministry of railways and WCD in November 2015, under which 1098 helpline posters were put across all trains in the country, considering trains are the most used medium of child trafficking.
“Last week itself, we rescued 69 children when we got a call from Madhya Pradesh that these children were accompanied by two-three men on a train from Madhya Pradesh to Mumbai. These children were bound for a tomato factory in Nagpur and a leather factory in Mumbai," said Nishit Kumar, head, communication and strategic initiatives, Childine India Foundation.
He said that Childline has an average response time of an hour after getting a call. The child in need of care is then sent to protection agencies—the police, hospitals, child welfare homes and hospitals—run by the government as well as those run by civil society agencies.
“Maximum complaints come from children in the age group of 11-14 years while 60% of them are boys and 40% are girls. Not all of them need to be rescued, some just call to seek help and counselling for coping with exam pressure or for things as small as fights at home with their parents," he added.
Childline, which responds in over 25 languages, currently operates six units across five cities (Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and Bengaluru) in partnership with 750 NGOs in the country.
To be sure, India recently extended support to the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) countries to upgrade their child helpline services on the lines of India’s Childline, in an effort to curb trafficking and violence against children in South Asia.
The biggest challenge to Childline, however, remains the decreasing number of PCOs (public call offices) in the country as a lot of children still don’t have access to mobile phones to be able to make calls.
“We plan to substitute PCOs with childline kiosks, 20 of which have already been set up at 20 major railways stations of the country including New Delhi, Delhi (main), Nizamuddin, Mumbai Central, CST Mumbai, Howrah, Ranchi, Chennai Central, Lucknow (NR), Lucknow (NER) and Guwahati. This is being extended to more railway stations and public places," said Gandhi.
The WCD ministry also plans to integrate Childline with anganwadis to increase its reach.
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