Once you dial, the call will be routed to the centralised customer centre in the Capital. Those working at the call centre have been professionally trained by doctors to help, primarily, teenagers deal with queries related to reproductive health, officials said.
The service has already begun, and it targets mainly adolescents, the newlywed, and about-to-be married people. The support is given primarily in English and Hindi.
“We are available from Monday through Saturday, and are getting around 30 to 40 calls every day on an average. We mainly get sex-related queries from teenagers,” one of the employees at the call centre said.
The centre would initially provide support to callers from Delhi and nearby areas — Ghaziabad, Gurgaon, Noida, Bulandshahr, Faridabad and Meerut. It would be spread to other parts of the country with time, officials said.
The National Informatics Centre, NASSCOM, and Central Bureau of Health Intelligence would provide technical support for the initiative. Shailaja Chandra, executive director of Jansankhya Sthirata Kosh, said the idea of setting up a special call centre t address sex and reproductive health-related queries came from medical practitioners, “who feel even basic knowledge about reproductive health is very poor (among Indians). Helplines cannot address the width of subjects on which people need information.”
Therefore, Chandra said, “JSK has started this initiative”.
Ministry officials said this initiative would give an opportunity to the youth to speak their mind out. “It is necessary to get information from people who are well-informed, rather than getting half-cooked information from peers,” a ministry official said. “Sex education manual will take sometime to be introduced again (but) this will definitely prove to be helpful.”
Several state governments had banned the sex education manual, introduced last year in school curriculum, for apparently “corrupting” young minds. Now, the National AIDS Control Organisation — along with parents, teachers and NGOs — is working on the manual once again. Officials said they would soon come out with a “softer version”.