Women centre receives 50 complaints daily
The centre provides immediate relief and remedy to the complainants by moving burns victims to the Civil Hospital and initiating legal proceedings against the culprits.
The centre also provides legal aid to the women in family disputes through filing cases in family courts to seek maintenance for the affected women. Free service of a lawyer is provided to the victims. The centre works during the day but has plans to provide a round-the-clock service soon.
Three more women complaint centres are operating at Hyderabad, Sukkur and Larkana which come to the immediate rescue of women whose lives are endangered due to the social evil of karo-kari and provide them protection against childhood marriages and those planned on an exchange basis (watta satta). Two such centres are likely to start working at Nawabshah and Mirpurkhas shortly.
Elaborating on the projects designed for women welfare, sources at the Women Development Department in Karachi told Dawn on Saturday that there was a project to build a hostel for working women in Karachi with a capacity to house 80 women. The lodging facility will be provided to the women including teachers and doctors working at places far from their homes.
This will be the first such hostel in the province which will be built in the main cities to cope with the needs of working women. The Karachi hostel will be equipped with a medical store, mosque, auditorium, recreation hall, library and servant quarters. A van will be at hand to provide transport to the residents in cases of emergency.
The department also runs a child day-care centre to facilitate working women, who leave their children at the centre in the morning while going to the office and collect them in the evening. The centre at Nursery provides services of trained maid servants to look after the children at the centre, where a doctor is available to take care of the children’s health and hygiene.
The Women Development Department has also set up a centre to train women, especially rural women, on how to take care of children and help them grow strong to become part of a healthy society.
The centre provides a three-month course to a badge of about 15 mothers with basic education up to matric. There is a plan to establish such centres in all 18 towns of Karachi and 23 districts of the province.
The department has plans to undertake a survey on women trafficking to find out the modus operandi of the trafficking gangs.The survey would help the government to stem causes and roots of women trafficking and take action against the gangs to eliminate the social evil.
Source: Dawn
Date:2/5/2007
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