The Hindu Business Line : Unicef pitches in to improve plight of Bengal children

THE United Nation's Children's Fund (Unicef) is prepared to intervene in certain key areas to help improve the plight of children in West Bengal, Unicef State Representative, Ms Carrie Auer, has said.

Speaking on the occasion of the launch of the State Plan of Action (SPAC - 2003), she said that these would be in certain areas like maternal and child health, immunisation, child development, education, nutrition, water and sanitation.

She said that in respect of many of the key indicators the State's performance was better than the national average, but it was still lower than states like Kerala which had achieved the level of developed countries in respect of some of these indices.

Ms Auer hoped that the monitoring sheet proposed to be prepared by the West Bengal Government would be a living document with yearly updates. She felt that there was a need to follow up the commitments with budgetary support.

She said that the preparation of this plan was actually the continuation of a long process that began with the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Various Governments followed up this commitment through formulation of their Plans of Action for Children in the early nineties. A decade later, was is only appropriate that the commitment is revisited and reaffirmed, she said.

The West Bengal Minister for Women and Child Development and Social Welfare, Mr B. Chowdhury, said that fixing targets was easy but attaining them was difficult. "We have to overcome a lot of impediments including a skewed distribution of our limited resources," he said.

Principal secretary, Ms Jaya Dasgupta, said that the action plan had been prepared in close cooperation with Unicef and other State departments. She said that yearly targets in the key sectors would be spelt out whenever practically applicable and it would be the State Government's endeavour to closely monitor such targets.

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