Runaway children are a serious cause for concern. The society should, and can, come up with ways to find homes for these lost children or send them back to their original homes. Excerpts:
This book is about children. It is not about all children, but about those children in India who for some reason leave their homes and families, usually by their own choice. The phenomenon of ‘runaway children’, as it is loosely called, is global. Wherever there are families with children, there are some children who choose to go away from home. The last official estimate on the numbers of street children across India was 11,000,000. It is esti-mated that across SO main railway stations, at least 70,000 and perhaps upto 120,000 (alone or unaccompanied by family) arrive onto the platforms every year. In comparison, it is estimated that about 84,000 children do this every year in the United Kingdom.
It is likely that more children take this step in India than in any other country simply because India is home to the largest number of children in the world. China has about 12 per cent more people in total, but India has about one third more under 18-year-olds. India is also home to a very large number of very poor people. Poverty is by no means the only reason why children run away from home, but it does play an important part.
This book is not about all runaway children in India. It is focused on Indian children who have used trains to take them away from home, and who live on railway station platforms or on trains. It is not known whether these children make up the largest proportion of Indian runaways, but there are certainly very many of them, and they are relatively easy to identify in the confined space of a railway station. Their situation is probably no worse or better than that of the hundreds of thousands of other children who live on India’s city streets.
There are many different terms for runaway children, or for what they become once they have successfully run away from their homes. Many live on the street, and are called street children. But in India and a few other countries, where railways provide the main form of long distance transport, there are large numbers of children who live on railway station platforms, or on trains themselves. They are known as railway children. Bus stations also provide homes and livelihood for large numbers of children.
This book presents the issues and challenges of reaching out to these ‘railway children’, particularly through the experiences of Sathi, an NGO based in Bangalore. This organisation has chosen to work with children on railway platforms across India with the intention of reuniting them with families where ever possible.
There are a number of books, feature films, documentaries and studies about runaway children themselves, and about ‘Street children’, since so many runaways end up living on the streets. Some of these present sad cases, perhaps with some analysis. Others, like the film Slumdog Millionaire, offer some hope of the children succeeding spectacularly, despite terrible ordeals. They all remind us of the problem which we may tend to ignore because it is so widespread and so complex. Besides, when we come across such children we think they are usually a nuisance, or even a threat.
This book is different. It includes a number of such stories, most with sad beginnings and some with happy endings. However, the focus and indeed the reason for writing, is the way in which one institution, Sathi, is trying to deal with the problem. The purpose of the stories is to show how complex the problem can be, and demonstrate the failures and successes of those who try to deal with it.
Excerpt taken from the book Rescuing Railway Children written by Independent Consultants Malcolm Harper and lalitha Iyer and published by Sage Publications.