Haryana as a State where :

1.   Every girl child, like her brother, is allowed to be born, where every child, whether boy or girl,
     grows up loved and wanted, healthy, well nourished, well looked after and enrolled in school.

2.   Women are treated with respect and dignity, their health, education, safety and security
      concerns are understood and taken care of, and they are allowed to enjoy all the rights
      available to men and have both the ability and the opportunity to contribute to all walks of
      life.

To achieve the above vision, the following would be done over a five year period :

  First priority would be to arrest the declining sex ratio and address the problem of
    female foeticide.

  The following approach would be adopted:

a)  In order to increase the number of girls being born, a special incentive based scheme would be started for families who give birth to two girl children and security provided by way of earlier old age pension to such families as have only girl children. In the first instance the scheme for the birth of two girl children would be started; the scheme for pension would be started later after carrying out a detailed survey to assess the financial implication for the State. Over a period of time, these measures would help in changing the mind set about the girl child and add value to her.

b)  providing awards to rural adolescent girls to encourage them to pursue higher studies.

c)  Working closely with the Health Department for enforcing the PNDT Act.

d)    Reserving jobs for women within their categories.

e)  Changing the mind set of society about gender and the girl child.  Schools would be targeted for doing so since boys and girls are still at an impressionable age and their thinking can be influenced:

i) Education Department would be requested to revise school curricula to make it child and gender friendly.

ii) Convention on the rights of the child and convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women would be disseminated to all students from class-IX onwards to generate awareness about problems and rights of children and women.

iii) Education Department would be requested to start Social Awareness Clubs in all High and Senior Secondary Schools which would be encouraged to go out to the community and conduct surveys on the prevalence of socially retrograde practices such as female  foeticide,  dowry etc.  This apart from generating data about such problems would also  create awareness in society about the existence of the problems and  its  baneful effects on society.

iv) Core Constituency of educated and aware men and women would be created and founded in every village and town locality.  This body would act as a bull-wark in the fight against prevalent social evils.  They would be trained to monitor and keep track of such practices, oppose such practices and help build a consensus in civil societies about the need to give up such practices.

v) Main streaming gender concerns in society by persuading Gram Panchayats and Municipal Committees to make the discussion of declining sex ratio, female foeticide, early child marriage, nutritional status of children and other social evils etc. as a compulsory item for discussion in their regular meetings.

   Priority would be given to significantly reducing the existing levels of malnutrition
      in children. 
      Over the next 5 years, it is proposed to bring malnutrition down by 50% of the existing
      levels.  At present about 14% of the children are suffering from grade-II, grade-III and grade
      – IV malnutrition.  This would be brought down to 13% by end of year – 1, to 12% by end
      year –2, to 10.5% by year – 3, 9% by year –4 and 7% by year -5.   The number of children
      so covered would be about one lakh. This would be done by the following:

  a)  Continuing with a focused targeting of families of malnourished children, concentrating continuously on such families for a period of three months.

  b)  All pregnant women would be encouraged to register their pregnancy immediately with the nearest Anganwadi/ PHC/ CHC/ Hospital. Every mother registered with the Anganwadi would be supplied material on child care and nutrition, care during pregnancy and care while nursing.  This would help in enhancing the capacity and knowledge of families to look after the health and nutrition needs of children.

 c)  Exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months and breastfeeding with complementary feeding upto two years would be promoted since these two combined are said to reduce the under five child deaths by as much as 19%.

d)  Local Village Panchayats will be actively involved in the day to day running of the Anganwaris, transferring control to the Panchayats would also be considered.

e)   Instead of providing ready to eat feed as supplementary nutrition, efforts would be made to involve the community itself in preparing such nutrition for children.  Doing so would help in changing the nutrition habits and empower communities.  Continuing to supply nutrition from outside only creates a dependency syndrome, vested interests, without tackling the problem, resulting in wastage of scarce resources.

           f)  Families would also be made aware about the distortion in food allocation within families so that children, particularly the girl child, adolescent girls, pregnant and nursing mothers get their due share of nutrition.

          g)   Circle and Block level awards would be instituted for families which look after the girl child according to specified parameters.

          h)  Anganwadi Centre Buildings would be constructed.  It is proposed to construct 348 Anganwadi centres per year, over five years 1740 Anganwadi buildings would be constructed.

     Enhancing socio-economic status of women

a)  Strengthening Women Development Corporation by providing it with additional share capital, subsidy and Administrative expenditure so that it could assist atleast 50,000 women entrepreneurs over the next 5 years, 10,000 per year.

b)  In addition to the existing Swayamsidha and Swa-shakti Self Help Group Programme, 25% of the existing Mahila Mandals would be converted into Self Help Groups, nurtured and provided Bank linkages over the next five years.

c)   Block level women’s sports events would be organized to provide leisure and recreation and to relieve of tedium of their existence.

d)   Kishori Shakti Yojana would be expanded to cover the remaining 31 Blocks through State Execution.

e)   To encourage a participatory approach, NGOs working in women sector would be encouraged and allocation to them substantially hiked.  The objective would be to have atleast five good NGOs per Block working in the area of women development.

f)  UNFPA funded Programme for Advancement of Gender Equality, will continue to be implemented in Rewari district upto December, 2005 for socio-economic empowerment of women through SHGs.

g)   Mahila Mandals will be involved in creating awareness generation among rural women for their socio-economic upliftment and change of mind-sets of rural society towards women.

   Strengthening institutional mechanism for creating a gender sensitive and enabling
      social environment through:

a)   Continuous training of Anganwadi and other Departmental staff on the pattern of           
      UDISHA.

b)  Gender training for the following categories:

i)    All Panches /Sarpanches and Municipal Committee Members.

ii)    All Thana level Police Officers.

iii)    All PHC/CHC level Health staff.

     It is proposed to conduct six training programmes per Block per year having 30 trainees
      per programme, about 20,000 people would be gender trained per year.

iv)   I.E.C. activities would be carried out on a large scale for promotion of welfare of women
      and child and publicity and other material would be widely disseminated and distributed.

v)    State Women Commission would be converted into a Statutory Body.

vi)    Registration of marriages would be made compulsory.  This would not only help in
       curbing marriages below the permissible marriage limit and help in implementing the Child
       Marriage Restraint Act but would also provide legal protection to women.

vii)   Job reservation within the respective categories for women is proposed.

viii)  Home Department would be requested to recruit more women in the Police Force at all
      levels so that atleast 15 to 20% of lower Police Force are women and have a women cell
      with only women in such cells in every Police Station in the State.

ix)  Panchayats and Municipal Councils would be requested to discuss the sense of insecurity in
     the minds of parents of the girl child with regard to her safety and security and mobilize
     the community to deal with the problem seeking the assistance of District Administration,
     if necessary.

x)   Khap Panchayats which yield considerable influence in the community would be engaged
      in dialogue and requested to use their influence in combating the various social evils      
      afflicting in the Haryana State.