The Minister of Women and Child Development, Smt Maneka Sanjay Gandhi today inaugurated the Two Day National Workshop on Role of Sakhi One Stop Centres in Strengthening Multi Sectoral Response to Violence in New Delhi. The workshop has been organized by the Ministry of Women and Child Development. Around 400 Sakhi- One Stop Centre Functionaries and nodal officials from State Department of Women and Child Development from 33 States/UTs across the country are participating in the two day workshop.

Addressing the participants, Smt Maneka Sanjay Gandhi said that the One Stop Centre Scheme is a highly critical intervention to protect and help women affected by violence. Keeping in view the importance of the scheme, it has to be ensured that the OSCs are run in a professional and efficient manner and complete empathy has to be shown for the women in distress who are visiting the centres. The purpose of the OSCs is to provide safe and pleasant environment to such women, she added. The Minister further said that the first One Stop Centre was setup in Raipur, Chattisgarh and within a short span of its working, it became a lifeline for women in distress. Since then, large number of OSCs have been set in several States across the country. The WCD Minister said that the Ministry of Women & Child Development is regularly monitoring the working of these centres and for capacity building of the staff managing these centres, the WCD Ministry will evolve a high level training course for each category i.e. may it be for nurses or psychologists or lawyers or policemen etc. She also urged the administrators of OSCs to give a continuous feedback to the Ministry regarding the issues and problem so that they can be addressed in a timely manner.

Secretary WCD, Shri Rakesh Shrivastava also highlighted the importance of One Stop Centre scheme and asked the participants to work diligently to make the scheme a great success, thereby bringing relief to lakhs of suffering women across the country.

The two day workshop has been organized with the broad objective of strengthening the quality of services at the One Stop Centres across the country. The workshop aims to:

·         Review the existing practices to exchange lessons learnt from working with the health sector and challenges and dilemmas faced in the work.

·         Further discuss the protocols and action plan for specific departments to address VAW

·         Foster and strengthen convergence model of working between various relevant departments such as health, home department, legal department namely DLSA, SLSA, and the women and child department and other stakeholders.

·         Develop a service delivery model from Group Work Session to provide quality services to the victims/survivors of violence.

·         Introduce Nirbhaya Dashboard – a real time OSC and Women Helpline data maintaining mechanism.

·         Cross learning of Best Practices of OSC operations among various States/UTs

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NB/UD