The Slumdogs Blog

Slumdog Millionaire trust 'Jai Ho' has come out to the rescue of the film's child stars Rubina Ali and others by hiring a social worker to look after her.

The Jai Ho Trust was established with financial support from the filmmakers to ensure the welfare of the movie's child stars, including Rubina and Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail. The trust has offered to help by hiring a trained social worker to look after the welfare of Rubina - amid allegations that the nine-year-old girl's father Rafiq tried to sell her for 2,00,000 pounds. However, Rafiq has denied the claims.

The Usnagazine have quoted saying the Director Danny Boyle and Producer, Christain Colson that they will remain commited to working the trust and the family to secure Rubina's long-term best interests. The trust will support Rubina, her parents and responsible authorities to ensure, the rights and interests of Rubina are protected. The trust is keeping regular contacts with Rubina and family and has now hired an experienced social worker to assist in her and Azharuddin's welfare activities. 

The independent trust was set up to ensure that the family of the child stars receive suitable accommodations and a fixed sum of money each month for living expenses. It also covers the education costs for Rubina and her siblings and provides her with a lump sum of money after she turns 18 years old.

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Economic and educational reforms in India have not dented the prevalence of child marriages, fuelling risks of multiple unwanted pregnancies, their termination and sterilisations, according to a new study led by an Indian- American. Anita Raj, associate professor of social and Behavioral sciences at Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) and her colleagues found that nearly half of adult Indian women aged 20 to 24 married before the legal age of 18.

These child marriages were significantly associated with poor fertility outcomes, such as unwanted and terminated pregnancies, repeat childbirths in less than 24 months, and increased sterilisation rates. "These results suggest that neither recent progress in economic and women's development, nor existing policy or programmatic efforts to prevent child marriage and promote maternal and child health, have been sufficient to reduce the prevalence of child marriage in India to that of most other developing nations," wrote Raj and colleagues. The study found that 44.5 percent of women aged 22 to 24 were married before age 18.  More than one in five - 22.6 percent - were married before age 16, while 2.6 percent were married before age 13.

India raised the legal age for marriage to 18 in 1978. In the past 15 years, national policy efforts have been developed to increase educational and economic opportunities for girls and women, reduce child marriage and expand family-planning support.

The authors said that while there had been a slight reduction - five percent - in the rate of child marriage compared with national data from 1998-99, the continued prevalence of the practice and its association with poor fertility outcomes highlights "the crucial need for increased family-planning interventions tailored to married adolescents".  The study found that women who married younger than 18 were significantly more likely to report no contraceptive use before their first childbirth than were those who married as adults. Nearly half - 48.4 percent - of women who were married as children reported giving birth before they turned 18. Women married as children also were more likely to have had repeat childbirths in less than 24 months and to have had three or more childbirths, than those married as adults.

Child marriage also was associated with an increased prevalence of unwanted pregnancies and an increased prevalence of pregnancy termination, defined as miscarriage, abortion or stillbirth, said a Boston University release. The study found sterilisation rates were higher for women married as children than for those married as adults - 19.5 percent, compared to 4.6 percent. Overall, more than one in eight women, or 13.4 percent, had been sterilised. Of those not sterilised, more than three-quarters reported no present contraception use, the research found.

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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

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Urban poverty in India is often understood as a function of rural poverty. Poor people move to the cities: ipso facto there is now urban poverty. Such a formula stressed the need to address rural poverty as the essential nexus for all other forms of poverty.

The "India:Urban Poverty Report, 2009" suggests that this view is faulty and that much of the blame for urban poverty results from inadequate urbanisation strategies.

With 24% of India's urban population live in slum style accommodation although not all slum dwellers are living below the poverty line. According to the report they have been marginalised because of the poor city planning and poorer urban land management and legislation. Urban poverty in the context of India is not about only nutritional deficiency but deficiencies in the basic needs of housing water, sanitation, medical care, education, and opportunity for income generation.

As the authors of the report state, it "is not a report on the poor in urban areas but a report on the process of urbanisation in India keeping poverty at the centre of analysis".

The report found that urban workers were increasingly gravitating to the informal economic sector, even as the sector for informal economic activities was shrinking. The profile of the work in urban areas has slowly moved from the typical status of casual employment (which is paid on regular basis) to self-employment, which carries its own uncertainties. The urban poor is increasingly a street vendor, a rickshaw puller, a rag picker, a cleaner, a washerman, a load carrier or a domestic servant. Jobs which offer few extra opportunities, carried few ancillary benefits and from their self-employed status carried a constant risk of further impoverishment in the event of illness or changing economic circumstances.

The Report states that while the these workers contributed to the growth of cities, there was growing trend to marginalise the poor to the urban periphery, as they were increasingly seen as threat to civic existence and as slum clearances were promoted for the purposes of property speculation

 Interestingly, urban poverty was found to be most pronounced in smaller cities and towns rather than the major urban metros like Mumbai and Delhi where rates were typically at 10%. Access to resources and increased mobility benefited the larger metros. Likewise the report warns against emphasising urban strategies on the large urban metros at the expense of smaller and growing cities. Towns of 50000 inhabitants displayed the highest levels of urban poverty.

So, although the share of the urban poor in the wider urban population has fallen. The increasing pace of urbanisation and the changing face of urban employment means that the absolute number of urban poor has risen.

As many 81 million or 25.7 per cent people (latest data: 2004-05) subsist in urban areas on incomes that are below the poverty line. For this group some eighty per cent of their meagre income goes towards paying for food and energy, leaving very little for meeting the cost of living in an increasingly monetised society.

 

 

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Slums and their dwellings don't have many supporters among architects and urban planners, but now they have received the royal seal of approval from Brit ain's Prince Charles who declared that Dharavi's use of local materials, its walkable neighbourhoods, and mix of employment and housing add up to "an underlying intuitive grammar of design that is totally absent from the faceless slab blocks that are still being built around the world to 'warehouse' the poor".

Viewers of Slumdog Millionaire will recall the scene where the boys return to Mumbai and overlook their old slum now swept away and replaced with high rise housing and the vibrant communal fabric is replaced with slabs of high rise buildings.

A number of reports are linking homelessness in developing cities with problems with overall urban planning strategy, a focus on western development styles and the replacement of local housing with often speculative projects funded by international investors building for property investors and the "burgeoning" middle class. 

Prince Charles is more famous for his aesthetic architectural attitude and less for the often sensitive engagement with the community urban approach of Alice Coleman that places more emphasis on overall community structure and less on the discreet building architecture. 

The redevelopment of Delhi and Mumbai has resulted in widespread destruction of pavement and slum dwellings without any concomitant commitment to build new communities. 

Prince Charles strictures will strike a chord with many who would like to see an urban planning paradigm that seeks to integrate slum dwellings into the overall urban plan rather than simply seeing them as stopgap solutions until such time as they can be torn down."I strongly believe that the west has much to learn from societies and places which, while sometimes poorer in material terms are infinitely richer in the ways in which they live and organise themselves as communities, It may be the case that in a few years' time such communities will be perceived as best equipped to face the challenges that confront us because they have a built-in resilience and genuinely durable ways of living."

With 50% of the world's population living in cities and that percentage expected to rise to 70% within 40 years, it is clear that a new approach to planning is going to be required and there is an increasing recognition that big concrete masterplans that strip slum communities from the centre of cities and relocate them to "garden city" peripheries are neither successful or satisfactory. 

Prince Charles comments reported in the Guardian

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What are your basic needs as a child? Answer might be- food, safe water to drink, a house where you are secure enough to live, good clothes to wear and education to learn new things. Now, think for a moment about the children who are deprived of all these basic necessities of life. India has a population of 1 billion with about 35 million orphans, many of whom live on the streets, in railway stations and in filthy areas, taking each day as it comes. Some children have been orphaned or abandoned by their parents or relatives, others have chosen to run away from the harsher realities at home. Yet there are some others who have been born on the streets and knows no other life.
This is a world of 'Street Children' which most of us close our eyes to. These children do not know where they are going. They lead and live an incomplete life. Most of these children might have never experienced the parental care and may never know what care and concern is. Due to various circumstances they are left on the street and survives, if the world they live in shows any mercy on them. Every child has the right to grow up in a family environment- in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding. Millions of street children around the world are denied of this right.
What makes these children homeless? There are many reasons behind this, mainly poverty. The most trecherous disease HIV/ AIDS has a great part in contributing to the number of orphaned children in India. Violence at home or other internal conflicts that in turn creates a mental trauma to the child also add to this cause. Children who are born illegally are also deserted onto the street. All the above stated reasons are what makes them and stigmatize as “The Underprivileged”.

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