Charlotte Wulff's List: justice project _ children on the street

• According to the 1993 UNDP human development report, India probably has the  greatest number of street children with around 100,000 each in New Delhi,  Bombay, and Calcutta and 45,000 in Bangalore. In order to survive, they must  collect rags, shine shoes, sell newspapers, and scavenge in rubbish heaps. Many  also turn to crime raising India's juvenile crime rate to 3.2 per 1,000 people,  the report points out.

• The number of children pushed into begging has been estimated by census  figures as about 151,000 -- 120,000 in rural areas and over 30,000 in towns. Of  those listed, West Bengal has 25 per cent of the national total followed by  Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Orissa. Police records  indicate that in many cases, parents themselves use their children for begging.  Other children may be victims of cruel exploitation in beggar colonies, where  kidnapped children are maimed and mutilated and forced to beg.

• In the area of education, it is pointed out that despite provisions within  the Constitution to provide free and compulsory education to each child till the  age of 14, this has not been realised so far. Out of a total of 575,926 villages  in the country, an estimated 48, 566 are not served by any school at all.

• Approximately 4.5 million children are being offered any kind of pre-primary  programme, forming barely five per cent of the population in the 3 to 6 age  group. Though on the positive side, over 80 per cent of six year olds are  enrolled in school and that of girls increased by 20 per cent between 1986 and  1993, on the other side of the coin, about 35 per cent dropped out before  completing primary school and 15 to 20 per cent did not attend school regularly.   

  About 32 million of the 105 million children aged 6 to10 were out of school  in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and West  Bengal. Barring states like Kerala and Tamil Nadu, reaching full enrollment of  the age group 6-10 remains a major challenge in all the states, says the report.  

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• A large proportion of the boys and girls in I-India’s homes have  suffered abuse. In addition to fulfilling their material needs, we seek to  provide a warm and caring atmosphere. Our vocational centres, too, are safe, fun  places where children gain confidence and self-esteem. We run a help line for  children in need, and, unusual amongst Indian NGOs, we employ male and female  full-time counsellors to support our children’s emotional  development.
• I-India provides non-formal street schools to ensure that working children  get at least a basic education. We nurture community support for our schools and  seek to mainstream suitable children into the government education system. We  also provide popular and practical vocational training where older children can  learn skills while also earning some money.
  
• I-India emphasizes care and opportunity for girls. There are more  girls than boys in our street schools, vocational centres and homes. We also  employ many women and do so at all levels up to the founder, Abha Goswami,  herself.
• I-India provides nutrition, medical treatment, plus hygiene and reproductive  health education to 1250 children in our street schools and homes. We run an  AIDS awareness program targeting an additional 500 at-risk children. We also  operate a Shower Bus that regularly visits street points and offers on-the-spot  showers and cleansing products. We employ several full-time nurses and have  relationships with hospitals that are willing to treat our children for free.  I-India also provides education on tracking malnutrition to local staff in 233  village health centres, benefiting 33,000 rural children.
• I-India prioritizes homeless street children. For them we provide:  repatriation to their families, temporary and permanent shelter, street schools,  vocational training, nutrition, medical treatment, shower facilities, AIDS  awareness and a help line.
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  The root causes of  poverty are beyond a single NGO’s power to change, but I-India believes in  helping where it can. Street schools provide some education, as does  mainstreaming of children into government schools and offering scholarships to  private schools. Vocational training centres are a pragmatic, but powerful, tool  to assist children in escaping the poverty trap. Children at these centres learn  skills such as jewellery-making and tailoring which can prove more valuable to  them than additional formal schooling. The money children earn at the centres  alleviates some of their poverty, and encourages the child and his/her parents  to choose vocational training over child labour. I-India has also been active in  promoting Child  Rights.

   

   

   

   

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• in every region of the world, in almost every aspect of their lives, children  are subject to unconscionable violence, most often perpetrated by the very  individuals charged with their safety and well-being.

• Tortures By Police and other Law enforcement Officials

• Violence against Children in Schools
• Suffering of Child Laborers
• Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of children who have been  orphaned or abandoned are placed in orphanages and other non-penal  institutions
• In armed conflict situations, children by the thousands are  killed, maimed, raped, and tortured every year.

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• As full citizens, people with disabilities are entitled to equal rights. In  their daily lives, they continuously battle exclusion and restriction to their  full participation in society, facing discrimination, abuse, and poverty.
  
• People with disabilities are entitled to equal access to education and  employment, equal rights to parenthood, property ownership, political rights,  and legal representation.
  
• Presently, there is no internationally binding convention specifically devoted  to the rights of people with disabilities
• A human rights perspective to disability requires society, and especially  governments, to actively promote the conditions for all individuals to fully  realize their rights.

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• The real Slumdog Millionaires: Behind the cinema fantasy, mafia gangs are  deliberately crippling children for profit
  
• Crippled: A child begging on Marine Drive in south Mumbai
  For at the  hospital, a doctor was paid to amputate one of his healthy legs.
• So just who would chop off the leg of a healthy child? The boys are victims of  India’s so-called ‘beggar mafia’ — criminals so violent and amoral that they are  prepared to hack the limbs off children, as well as steal new-born babies from  hospitals.
  
• They use the children as begging ‘props’ to maximise their earnings from  sympathetic passers-by.
• In a country of 1.2 billion people, where the gulf between rich and poor is  vast, there are an estimated 300,000 child beggars.
  
• By no means all are mutilated by the beggar mafia, but those with the worst  injuries do make the most money — up to £10 a day for deformed children, a  fortune in a country where millions survive on just a tenth of that.
  Not  that Aamir and Dalbeer saw any of their earnings. After being crippled and put  to work on the streets, the children are forced to hand over the cash to gang  masters each evening. And if they don’t hit their ‘targets’, they are beaten and  tortured.
  
• Perhaps unsurprisingly, almost all of these child beggars, whether mutilated or  not, are addicted to solvents, alcohol and charras (powerful Afghan hashish,  often laced with opium), which are supplied by the gang masters to keep the  children under control.
  
• when she returned, her baby had been taken. The ‘social worker’ is believed to  have been part of a gang which steals babies for the beggar mafia.
  

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