Himachal governor inspects hostel where girls exploited

SHIMLA - Himachal Pradesh Governor Urmila Singh Friday conducted a surprise inspection of a tribal girls’ hostel at Solan town, where some girls were allegedly sexually exploited by the hostel in-charge.

“Urmila Singh interacted with five girl students in the hostel. She expressed dissatisfaction over the facilities being provided in the hostel by the management and directed district authorities to give her a report regarding the functioning of the hostel,” a government spokesperson said.

Acting on the complaint of a 13-year-old girl from Kinnaur, police conducted raid on the hostel and arrested hostel in-charge Pawan Goel Tuesday. The girl is now being treated for depression at Indira Gandhi Medical College Hospital in Shimla.

Goel, who had been accused of sexually exploiting the girls for more than a year, has been sent to police custody till Feb 15. A case under Section 354 of the Indian Penal Code and Section 3 of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Act has been registered against him.

The victims, mainly from tribal districts of Himachal Pradesh and Jharkhand, were students of class VII to X at a government high school in Solan and were staying in the hostel where Goel, 48, was the overall in-charge. His wife Kiran Goel was the hostel warden. The Goels lived within the hostel complex.

The hostel is being run by the Bharatiya Adimjati Sevak Sangh, a national-level voluntary organisation for tribal welfare. Funded by the tribal affairs ministry, it runs 21 such hostels across the country.

Shyam Manohar, general secretary of the Bharatiya Adimjati Sevak Sangh, told IANS that Goel has been suspended and his wife withdrawn from the hostel.

This was the second such incident in the state in less than a year.

In March last year, a school principal and two teachers were arrested in Shimla on charges of sexually exploiting six deaf and dumb children of a school run by an NGO.