socio-economic and cultural needs of a child for its all around development. And we made sure that this pioneering programme was child-centric, gender-sensitive and rooted in the life and environment of the community.

In order to alleviate the problems of the children, the West Bengal Correctional Services in partnership with National Legal Services Authority formulated a programme – Integrated Developmental Support to Prisoners’ Children Living Back Home in the Community. The basic idea was to pool together our resources and develop a support system for the prisoners’ children back home that endeavored to be a holistic programme, tackling the educational, health, socio-economic and cultural needs of a child for their all around

Such a stupendous task of reaching out to these children in the far flung areas of the State could not obviously have been achieved by the very limited manpower and resources in the correctional homes of the State. We, therefore, sought active participation of some prominent social and non-governmental organizations. Ramakrishna Mission Ashram, Malda, Don Bosco Prison Ministry, Berhampore, OFFER, Kolkata. Udayani Social action Forum, Kolkata ( St. Xavier’s’ group), Matrisangha Janakalyan Ashram, Rotary Club of Calcutta Mahanagar and Satyam Seva Kendra, Kolkata are some of the organizations who readily accepted our proposal and became our civil society partners for implementation of the programme. And we welcome anyone else who would be interested to join us in this endeavour.