New Delhi: Union Minister for Women and Child Development Maneka Gandhi Wednesday said that the One Stop Centres, meant for women in distress, should not be opened in hospitals and claimed it to be a bad idea.
She blamed the states which have opened such centres at hospitals. Odisha is one of the states which opened the One Stop Centre on the premises of Capital Hospital in Bhubaneswar.
Although the Union minister did not name Odisha in her speech here, she criticised the state governments who are doing so.
“I have come across some One Stop Centres being opened in hospital premises. There are some states which did that in haste. The women who needed these centres were not patients and thus such a move should have been avoided,” she said while responding to the queries of reporters on the achievements of her ministry in the last four years of the NDA government at the Centre.
The ministry has been implementing One Stop Centre scheme since April 1, 2015 to support women victims of violence. The scheme aims to facilitate access to an integrated range of services including medical aid, police assistance, legal aid/case management, psycho-social counselling, and temporary support services to the victims.
As per the information from the ministry, Odisha is home to a lone One Stop Centre named Sakhi, located on the Capital Hospital premises in Bhubaneswar and has been functional since October 1, 2015.
Meanwhile, Maneka also announced that all the police stations and government hospitals in states would soon be equipped with a ‘Rape Kit’ which could ensure all samples of blood, semen and other key evidences are collected in these kits first from the victims and sent to the nearby forensic laboratories for investigation which could boost the investigation process in rape cases.
She said that Nirbhaya Funds would be used to start new forensic laboratories which were earlier only confined to Chandigarh. The new central forensic labs would come up in Guwahati, Bhopal, Pune and Chennai.
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