SC seeks Covid orphans’ data from Delhi, Bengal

NEW DELHI : The Supreme Court on Monday told Delhi and West Bengal governments to share full information about the number of orphans and vulnerable children who were abandoned or lost single parent during the Covid-19 pandemic since April 2020.

A tabular chart presented to the Court by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) contained a list of 30,071 children across states/ union territories who lost either or both parents for the period from April 1, 2020 to June 5, 2020. Delhi reported unusually low figures of five orphans and 12 children who lost either parent. The figure was even low in West Bengal with just three orphans and eight children who lost one of their parents. This information was listed by the respective district or state level officers on the NCPCR portal “Bal Swaraj”. The portal requires states to provide information about orphans, abandoned children or those needing care and protection on account of losing a parent or guardian in six stages.

Additional Solicitor General (ASG) KM Nataraj appearing for NCPCR singled out Delhi and Bengal and said, “We are concerned about these two states/ UTS as they are not at all cooperating in filling up the data on our portal. Rest of the states/uts are reasonable in their figures.”

“If information is not given to NCPCR, continuous monitoring of these children becomes difficult,” the law officer said.

The figures appeared unusually low to the court too. A bench of Justices L Nageswara Rao and Aniruddha Bose said, “Delhi can’t be similar to Andaman and Nicobar Islands or a state like Sikkim. How do you explain your figures?” The court put this query to Bengal as well.