The Slumdogs Blog

In Mumbai, a brothel agent, labor recruiter, or other predator usually approaches children within 15 minutes of their arrival, according to Saathi- An NGO organization. To maintain a 24-hour watchout, NGOs enlist the help of vendors, bathroom cleaners, ticket checkers, and others who work in the station. A community that is in the railway station can understand who are the new faces. Once new children are identified, reuniting them with families can be difficult. Many come from close-knit rural villages, where there is a strong stigma associated with runaways. Often a reluctance is shown by other families to accept the returning children.

Despite the perils of station life, the children who have found a precarious home in Mumbai Central may be the fortunate ones. Those who end up in one of Bombay's thousands of "pavement communities" (living on sidewalks, in parks, or in empty lots) are at higher risk for disease, starvation, and sexual abuse.

In the stations, the boys are under the domain of the railway police. In the past, the Railway Protection Forcehad a mandate to clear stations of unaccompanied children. The result was all of them were perceived as criminals. That attitude began to change in the late 1990s. A national 24-hour hot line for runaway children opened in 1996 and receives 1,000 calls a day in Bombay alone from people who find runaways and lost children and call to have them picked up and taken care of.

In 2000, the government passed the Juvenile Justice Act, which outlines the rights of children and mandates the government to work with NGOs to address the problems of homeless children. Incidents of violence against the kids are now rare, and commuters who see a child being beaten are more willing to interfere than before. Despite the changes, serious threats to children remain, such as police taking bribes from brothel agents.

The presence of NGOs does more than help the children. Although adolescent boys, some of whom work the trains in groups as pickpockets and necklace-snatchers, are still a major problem, railway police say petty theft by younger children has declined in recent years. The feeling among observers is that children who are looked after by someone are less desperate and more law-abiding.

The police often deny the existence of juveniles making their permanent homes in railway stations. But railway police routinely use station children to fetch tea, clean stations, and do less pleasant tasks (Eg: On a recent afternoon at Bombay's Thane railway station, two officers ordered a group of station kids to remove from the tracks the body of a woman struck by a train a few minutes earlier).

Source: The Christian Science Monitor