Mapping India

India map

Lawyer and founder of voluntary organisation PAAVI Foundation, Kanika Arora, has been working on creating awareness related to child sexual abuse, equality and positive masculinity since 2019. Starting the foundation while still in college, she collaborated with municipal corporation primary schools in Delhi to conduct workshops on good and bad touch and disseminate legally accurate information.

PAAVI Foundation's latest project Samrakshak is a digital map with information about schemes initiated by different states for children who have lost their parents to Covid-19. After the Supreme Court's judgement last year, state governments started launching their own schemes to provide relief to children, along with the central scheme that was running. "We decided to focus on the many schemes and started collating information which is actionable for affected children under the age of 18 [or even 21 in some states]," says Arora.

Kanika Arora

The first step was to gather information, by checking news and government sites to track which department of the state had released the scheme, and even filing RTIs for states where adequate information was not available. In this, linguistic barriers proved the biggest challenge. "Moving beyond north India, most of the content is in regional languages, and Google translator also failed," she says, sharing that she had to rely on information provided by ministers through their Twitter handles. The constant advancements and developments in the schemes were also challenging to verify. Despite the challenges, the main aim is "to give access to NGOs and other people who want to help children and the community because they are also not aware of these schemes which are there for them," says Arora.

paavi.org