ABSTRACT
Nilima Mehta’s professional journey in child-centred social work (CSW) has been her “Ikigai” that gave tremendous meaning and fulfilment to her rewarding career. Social work education, with its core values and principles, knowledge, attitude and skills, approaches, and strategies, guided her trajectory for evolving macro to micro-level interventions and impact the lives of vulnerable children. The challenges she encountered in the space of social work with children, and in addressing their multiple vulnerabilities, she used multi-sectoral collaboration, between the government, judiciary, and civil society organisations. She found that the key challenge is to bring the “CHILD” into the centrality of policies, programmes, and legislations, as well as on the political agenda of the country. Child advocacy and child participation are important components of social work with children, when the eventual goal of CSW is zero tolerance to violence against children, the 24x7 protection of children, and ensure that no child is left out of the safety net. The challenge in the domain of CSW is to address the issues of multiple vulnerabilities based on caste, class, gender, region, religion, disability, patriarchy, discrimination within the rights-based framework.
