Salaam Balak Trust Q3 November 2008

Old Delhi Railway Station

Money received from OPS by SBT is channelled particularly towards the project at the Old Delhi Railway Station.

The initial idea was to set up a contact point on one of the platforms.  At the time, a large number of kids were sleeping in and around the station.  As always, they were doing so illegally and risked being beaten by police, and/or carted off to a lock-up.  Over the last year, however, the police action has gone from sporadic to persistent and as a result most of the kids have moved elsewhere.  (It’s much the same story at the New Delhi station.)

SBT staff realised that many kids gathered instead under a nearby bridge and that drug abuse is prevalent there.  Almost all the kids are into solvent abuse - the classic street kid practice of sniffing Tipp-Ex – but the younger ones also risk being led by the older ones into injecting harder drugs.

So the plan changed and for a few months, SBT has been renting a small space in a building near this bridge, to target the younger kids.  The programme is generally a similar mix of counselling, provision of health care and food and non-formal education that SBT already provides elsewhere, but tailored to the specific problems of children in this area, many of whom are not runaways or orphans but children of railway workers or other poor parents.  A few may go to school and have a roof over their heads but are still semi-vagrant and spend time begging and sleeping rough.

The Trust has provided OPS with an up-to-date summary of their 'new registrations' per month.  Under the guidelines of the programme supported by Family Health International, of which this forms a part, a new registration is any child who receives at least some form of support from SBT on one occaision, be it healthcare, education or re-patriation.  As with all the contact points, some children never come back while others attend regularly and may agree to come into a full-time shelter home. Click here for their summary: SBT Registrations 07-08

Mobile school

SBT's latest initiative to increase educational opportunities is its first four-wheeled project.  The Trust is one of two NGOs working in conjunction with the Delhi Government to run these mobile learning centres.

The buses target some of the children who are excluded from education by virtue of where they and/or their families live, such as slum settlements, construction sites or stations - very much the areas where SBT has increasingly been developing outreach programmes to try to encourage more children into at least some form of education.

Official figures claim that the percentage of children outside any schooling in Delhi has fallen from an alarming 17.5% to just under 6% as a result of various programmes such as this.

The SBT bus - converted with support from UNICEF from an old Delhi Transport one - is equipped not just with books and educational toys but also computers and a TV, so the staff can offer a range of teaching methods including animated DVDs.  It travels a set route and makes four stops a day, including one in the notorious red-light area of GB Road, for a 2-hour lesson at each.  Typically these cover general non-formal education but also include group discussions on health or hygiene, social skills, and some games and first aid.  The children get some extra food at the end of each lesson.

The buses were actually 'launched' by the Delhi Chief Minister some time earlier in the year but without making sure that SBT had anywhere safe and appropriate to park; now, however, the SBT one is fully operational and in its first quarter, it reached out to about 500 children.  Impressively, SBT has already managed to have a few dozen of these admitted into formal education.

Annual play

November is always the highlight of the year for the artistically-minded children, which always seems to be the majority of them.  There is an annual play performed for free to the public at a major auditorium in Delhi, the aim being to increase awareness of SBT itself and the potential talents of street children, and so to reduce the stigma they face.   And the therapeutic benefits to traumatised kids of taking part in the process of creating and performing in these productions has been well documented.

This being SBT’s 20th anniversary, the programme is bigger than usual and also includes two evenings of dance, performed by the SBT boys and girls and choreographed by Avinash, an SBT beneficiary who ran away from home at the age of 11 after his mother beat him for letting the family goat eat some of their crop.  After several years at SBT he is still only 24 but already a highly successful freelance dancer and choreographer, whose productions have recently toured in Europe and elsewhere.

Nick Thompson - November 2008