Supreme Court asks Centre to give details about ‘PM-CARES for Children’ scheme
The Supreme Court on Tuesday asked the Centre to provide information on the recently launched ‘PM-CARES for Children’ scheme for kids orphaned by COVID-19, and directed states to appoint a nodal officers to apprise it on identification and welfare measures for such children.
The National Commission of Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR), in its affidavit, said meanwhile that as per the data given by states so far, 9,346 children have either lost both or one of the parents to the deadly virus.
As many as 1,742 children have lost both of their parents and 7,464 have lost one of the parents, the child rights body told a vacation bench of justices L Nageswara Rao and Aniruddha Bose.
The top court took note of the submissions of lawyer and amicus curiae Gaurav Agrawal that Prime Minister Narendra Modi on May 29 launched the scheme which aims to provide various reliefs to the children orphaned by the pandemic and he did not have much detail about.
Under ‘PM-CARES for Children’ scheme, various steps would be taken including providing a corpus of ₹ 10 lakh when the beneficiary child turns 18 years old.
The fixed deposits will be opened in the names of such children, and the PM-CARES fund will contribute through a specially designed scheme to create a corpus of ₹ 10 lakh for each of them, the government had said in a statement earlier
Additional Solicitor General Aishwarya Bhati undertakes to file details of the scheme…the Union of India shall also furnish the information relating to the mechanism for monitoring the scheme, the bench said in its order.