Scheme for adolescent girls soon

Kakinada: A comprehensive action plan has been drafted for the empowerment of adolescent girls in West Godavari district with the administration implementing Kishori Vikas scheme, shortly.

In this purview, district collector K Bhaskar conducted a review meeting, here on Monday, where he directed Integrated Child Development Service (ICDS) project officials, panchayat raj, educational officials on the action plan of Kishori Vikas scheme. He said that the guidelines would be chalked out to implement the scheme in the district, regarding social, educational, health and other issues.

The collector asked the officials to implement the scheme with commitment to benefit adolescent girls. He directed the officials to collect the details of adolescent girls in the villages with full particulars and submit it by next week. He directed them to take up the awareness programmes on the scheme in 909 panchayats, 72 clusters in the urban areas by coordinating with grama samakhyas.

The objective of Kishori Vikas is to educate and create awareness among adolescent girls in areas of gender awareness, menstrual health and hygiene, nutrition, social issues like child marriages, child abuse, child trafficking, goal setting and career guidance.

It also aims at enabling self-development and empowerment of adolescent girls and to develop life skills to make informed decisions and practice healthy behaviours. The plan envisages to educate girls to protect themselves from sexual harassment and unruly opposite sex attraction.

The scheme aims at covering the adolescent girls in the age group of 14 to 18 years in government residential institutions like welfare hostels, KGBVs and other government residential institutions. Besides, it also targets the government schools and junior colleges also and girls who are school dropouts.