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مارس 14, 2022

Government curbs choking media in J&K: Press Council panel

A fact finding committee (FFC) of the Press Council of India (PCI) has found that the “news media in the Jammu & Kashmir region, and especially in the Valley is slowly being choked mainly because of the extensive curbs imposed by the local administration”.
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“There is also the threat of violence by the militants which acts as a deterrent,” the committee has said in its report that was submitted last week.
The FFC was set up in September 2021 by then PCI chairman Justice (retd) C K Prasad to look at the state of the media in Jammu and Kashmir after PDP leader and former Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti wrote to the Council.
“There is a long list of journalists who have been individually harassed. The object is to create a fear and intimidation to fall in with the government line,” the FFC report says.
According to the report, “normal lines of communication between the local government administration and journalists has been disrupted” because of the government’s “suspicion that a large number of local journalists are sympathizers of the militants’ cause”.

Lt Governor Manoj Sinha had “frankly told the FFC that many journalists were of ‘anti-national’ persuasion”, the report says. “He (Sinha) conceded that when he was first appointed, he used to encourage open press conferences, but now had gone back to a ‘selective engagement’ with preferred journalists.”
The three-member committee, comprising Prakash Dubey, Suman Gupta, and Gurbir Singh, recorded “numerous cases of journalists being subject to interrogation, threatened and made to fill irrelevant profiling documents”.
Some journalists had been “summoned to the dreaded ‘Cargo Centre’ for questioning — a location reserved for interrogation for armed militants”, the report said. Many journalists spoke about “the constant harassment they faced in the line of duty from security forces. These ranged from accusations of aiding the ‘separatists’ to lengthy interrogation in police camps, to detention and arrests for circulating ‘fake news’”, it said.
The police had “conceded to the FFC that as many as 49 journalists have been arrested and charged since 2016, not a small number considering that J&K has a very small press corps.
“Of these 8 have been arrested under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), which makes bail almost impossible. The police case is many journalists indulge in ‘anti-national’ activities.”
The committee recommended that “those indulging in any criminal acts, are not journalists pursuing their profession”, and if a journalist “is bearing arms or carrying grenades and other ammunition, he is not a journalist; he is a militant, and should be treated as such”.
However, the security establishment “cannot label writing against government policies, or quoting a family or civilian sources in a story about excesses of the armed forces, or tweeting a point of view as ‘fake news’ or ‘anti-national activity’ and then arresting the journalist for sedition”, the FFC said.
It is “not the business of journalists to support government policies or development work. A journalist’s job is to report the news as it happens, even if it is unpalatable to government officials”, the report underlines.
“A conflict zone has many players and many aspects of events that unfold. A journalist cannot and should not ignore the government version; at the same time, he is not the spokesperson of the government.”
The FFC found that “in the guise of information gathering, threats and various forms of intimidation by the police have become part of the new ‘normal’ in the Kashmir valley, particularly after the imposition of central rule since August 2019”.
It expressed concern that “the public relations work of various government departments has been taken over by the Police”, and recommended that “this should cease as it is against the letter and spirit of the functioning of the various arms of a democratic government.”
Journalists, the committee said, “rely on communication networks like the Internet, and access to events and persons, to gather and transmit news”, which “a government has the power to snuff…out as we have seen in the case of J&K”.
It noted that the suspension of mobile Internet whenever there is a conflict, and denying access to the scene of an armed encounter are ways to prevent free and fair news gathering in J&K. These “policies must be reversed”, the committee said.
“Journalists must be allowed to go about their work as professionals, as long as they do not hinder normal security operations,” the report said.
“It is also noticed that the government establishment has denied normal privileges like ‘accreditation’ and freedom to travel locally and abroad… By choking lines of communication and a free flow of reporting, the government will only encourage the spread of rumours and hearsay, which is in the long run detrimental to everyone.”

The committee said “there is no convincing reason” for why the Kashmir Press Club was “superseded and put in cold storage”. Its registration should be restored, “and government officials should not interfere is the election process of what is essentially a private body of news persons”, it said.
The report recalled that in her letter to the Press Council, Mehbooba Mufti had mentioned that journalists who are summoned by the police are made to fill a questionnaire “which is suggestive that the person might have links with ‘anti-national’ forces”. Among the 25 questions are those on the journalist’s “political allegiance”, “details of property owned”, and “relations in Pakistan”.
Inspector General of Police Vijay Kumar had “no hesitation in conceding that there exists a programme to profile journalists working in the J&K region”, the report said. It quoted the officer as saying, “Our aim is to profile 80% of Kashmiris, and we will do it for journalists too.”

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مارس 13, 2022

Eye on dropouts, Sikkim plans free sanitary pads in all govt schools

IN A first, the Sikkim government is set to announce a scheme to install vending machines to provide free sanitary pads in all its 210 secondary and senior secondary government schools across the state, in its annual Budget later this month.
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The scheme, “Bahini”, aims at providing “100 per cent access to free and safe sanitary pads to secondary and senior secondary schoolgoing girls”, says a government note. It aims to curb dropout of girls from schools and raise awareness about menstrual hygiene.
There are about 18,665 adolescent girls studying in government schools in Sikkim. The scheme is based on an experiment the state government initiated in 2018, in collaboration with Sulabh International, where vending machines were installed in some schools.
“This is the first time that a state government has taken a decision to cover all girls studying in Classes 9-12. We had provided sanitary pads through vending machines in some schools, but that was ad hoc. And due to lack of budgetary support, some machines have fallen into disrepair, or stocks of pads have not been acquired. But this time, with the scheme being a part of the Budget, this will not be a problem. All schools will be covered and we will issue tenders for the dispensing machines. We will also install incinerators at these schools for proper disposal of pads,” said Additional Chief Secretary (Education) G P Upadhyay.
The decision to roll out ‘Bahini’ was taken at a meeting of the ruling Sikkim Krantikari Morcha on March 4.

“The issue of menstrual hygiene has been important for the SKM. The Chief Minister has talked about it in several of his speeches and we have been trying to formalise a scheme since 2018. Access to sanitary napkins, especially in rural Sikkim, much of which is remote and difficult terrain, is difficult. Often, even shops don’t keep napkins in these areas,” said Bikash Basnet, press secretary to Chief Minister Prem Singh Tamang.
“It’s not just providing sanitary napkins which is important, but creating an awareness about menstrual hygiene as well as general hygiene among girl students, especially adolescent girls,” said Upadhyay. “In rural Sikkim, there is little knowledge about menstrual hygiene. So we will hold training programmes for teachers and counsellors who will then disseminate the information to the students. Our hope is that the students will take this information back to their communities — and we will be able to target the women of these communities through the students,” he said.
He said that while girls in Sikkim may not drop out of schools due to menstruation, it is definitely a contributing factor. Upadhyay said the dropout rate of students in Sikkim, for both boys and girls, is similar to the national average, which is approximately 20% for both genders.
According to WaterAid India, during menstruation, adolescent girls skip school for five to six days every month, and 23 per cent opt to drop out completely due to lack of proper toilet facilities and inadequate provisions.
“Another factor is that accessibility of sanitary pads depends on affordability. There are many companies that produce pads locally now, but the fear is that these pads are not of good quality,” said Ranjana Das, who works on gender at Oxfam.
Upadhyay said that according to the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, anganwadi centres are to be set up inside school campuses. “Very often, women don’t always turn up at anganwadi centres. But if they are in schools, access becomes more natural as students come everyday in any case. So anganwadi and ASHA workers will also be roped in for our menstrual hygiene programme under Bahini,” he said.

In 2015, the central government introduced the national guidelines on menstrual hygiene management. The World Bank earlier noted that one of the surveys that informed the national guidelines found that in 14,724 government schools across the country, only 53 per cent had a separate and usable girl’s toilet. In addition, 132 million households did not have a toilet.
“Most women in rural areas resort to homemade sanitary pads… In Champaran in Bihar, for instance, women continue to use homemade napkins. Lack of access to menstrual facilities is a major reason why girl students drop out of schools in India, alongwith having to help in household chores, and look after their siblings. Schools in India simply do not provide safe places for menstruating girls, such as proper toilets,” said Das. “During their menstrual cycle, girls simply don’t go to school, which affects their education. And this lack of access follows them into the workforce,” she said.