A few days back, Delhi’s Lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jung had directed principal secretaries and secretaries that no helplines should be stopped at any cost. However, the ‘181 helpline’ for women in distress has been shut down, sources in the Delhi Secretariat said.
The helpline was launched by former chief minister Sheila Dikshit in the aftermath of Nirbhaya gang rape on 16 December, 2012. Employees who handle these distress calls have not been paid from more than two months and their contracts have not been renewed since 31 December, 2013.
Officials said most calls received by the round-the clock help line were related to stalking, eve-teasing, obscene calls, sexual abuse and domestic harassment. ‘All employees running the helpline were outsourced. As there is no government, no one has renewed their contracts and as a result they are not being paid,’ said a Delhi government official.
Head of the helpline, Khadijah Farooqui, a women rights activist who was hired by Sheila Dikshit as a consultant, wrote a letter to Najeeb Jung seeking his immediate interference for releasing their salaries and timely review of the helpline.
The letter, a copy of which is with Millennium Post, says, ‘We have not received our salaries for the last two months. No review has been done after September 2013 and we are totally in the dark about our future. Approvals done by Sheila Dikshit for starting one-stop crisis cell in hospitals and courts and providing 3 mobile vans to 181 staff members for rescue operations were not taken up.’
The helpline has a team of 12 women for attending calls. All of them are from economically weaker section, survivor of violence and lone bread earners in their families. Four floor supervisors also work here in different shifts.
‘We have put our day and night’s hard work to let this helpline work. We were able to develop a new advanced computer resource management system and handled 7 lakh calls and more than 75,000 heinous criminal cases,’ she wrote in the letter to LG. A senior Delhi government official said that the helpline may get an extension of one month.