Karnali, Dec 18 : Chief Minister of Karnali Province Jeevan Bahadur Shahi argued that formulation of law alone would not address all problems facing society, At a workshop organized on children welfare in Surkhet on Sunday, CM Shahi shared that children below 13 to 14 years were addicted to narcotic drugs and this problem was prevalent in Surkhet.
“Only laws do not help much. So, each citizen should be responsible,” argued Shahi, urging the stakeholder agencies in the province to launch model project for children in Karnali instead of a pilot project.
The CM asserted that provincial government was serious about enabling an environment where every child in Karnali Province could avail education in vicinity of his/her family. Similarly, Minister for Social Development in the Province Yagya Bahadur Budachhetri said that the province government was committed to preventing the practice of sending away children preparing a forged document of the children’s orphan state.
According to him, the government of Karnali Province had adopted the policy of providing health and life skills related education to the children and had laid a special emphasis for securing welfare of the Province’s children.
National Child Rights Council’s Ram Bahadur Chand worried that although the Children Protection Act-2078 BS was put in place to prevent children from sending to orphanage through fraudulent means, it was not helping much to address the issue.
Of 4,600 children reported to be missing from all over the country in the current fiscal year 2022/23, 4,200 were found by the police at the initiatives of the National Child Rights Council, informed Chand.
Likewise, Superintendent of Police Hira Pandey shared that of the total 357 children missing from Karnali Province in the ongoing fiscal year, 269 were found so far while whereabouts of remaining 88 were still unknown.
