Economic Woes: The Invisible  Face of  Poverty 

Sanhita Saikia

(Freelance Journalist based at New Jersey USA,She can be reached at sanhitasaikia@yahoo.com)

We often hear about the progress of developing countries but the reality for many is a life lived on the edge and a daily fight against the bare necessities of life.The most affected are the children .According to Unicef, India is home to over 30% of almost 385 million children living in extreme poverty, the highest in South Asia. Violence against children in India includes neglect, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, and exploitation.

India is a country that uniquely blends the mystical with the messy, the serene with the chaotic, and the rich with the poor.For those of us, who lead privileged lives cocooned from the harsh realities of poverty and violence it is often difficult to imagine the desperation and the struggle of the poor and the homeless.

The sight of street children always troubled me. Street children challenged my own assumptions of what it meant to exercise rights, have a family, and be educated and healthy.These children are often victims of violence at home and are seen as worthless and criminals to the society and themselves. Every child has a unique story to tell in which they live, the desperation that lead them to run away from home, and the challenges they struggle to survive on the streets.

A tour called City Walk in Delhi took me to the world of street children, where I saw how they lived and earned their livelihood by begging, working and rag picking. The guide led us into a small square through a crowded and chaotic alley that surrounds the New Delhi railway station. We came across a scene that could be straight out of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Boys were emptying filthy sacks onto the ground outside the shop of a trash recycler. They were selling bottles and cans that they’d scavenged around the neighborhood. It was as though there was not one but two cities layered one over the other. Places where the homeless and street children congregate at night become pavements, streets, road dividers and shopping corridors at dawn.

Eleven-year-old Anurag never went to school because he had to scavenge through Delhi’s bins, dumps and gutters in search of sellable trash each day before spending his nights sleeping on the street. Sita a thirteen year old girl begs in the streets and looks after her younger brother. Many a times she did not have anything to eat because whatever she earned was not enough to feed two people.

Most of the children eat what they find in the garbage or what they steal. Some of the 11-year-olds are so underweight and undersized they look like six-year-olds, and those aged six often look only three or four. They testify to suffering on a scale that defies our understanding. Children as young as seven years old use drugs to numb the pain and deal with the hardships associated with street life. The mental, social and emotional growths of these children are lost in the vicious cycle of poverty. Yet their stories are full of honesty, generosity and hope for a better future.

India has an estimated 11 million street children. It is unfortunate that although the problem of street children is one of the key challenges that we face as a nation, very little has been done to deal with it. If street children don’t get their basic rights related to nutrition, education and sanitation, India will definitely fall behind in the global race for sustainable development.We have heard many public statements from government leaders on what plans they claim to have in order to deal with this problem in a more serious manner. But as is the case with other development challenges, there is too much rhetoric around the problem of street children.

The term “street child” did not figure in the official vocabulary of India until 1993, when under pressure from NGOs the government launched a Scheme for Assistance to Street Children” in six major cities. Now, it’s been extended to all cities with more than one million, but it hasn’t helped. “Making laws is not enough. There is a law against child labour but you see them everywhere. Under the Right to Education, every street child should be in school, but millions are getting wasted on footpaths.

A multiple level intervention strategy needs to begin with the rehabilitation of street families. They must be provided with social security to stop children from working for incomes; night shelters must be provided for boys and girls, and their health and education requirements must be addressed. Since most of the street children are illiterate, or near-illiterate, efforts to provide them with basic education need to spread their net much wider than they do at present.

For us as individuals this problem stares right in our face every day. We need to step up and start acting to help save the children on the streets. Generosity doesn’t have to mean giving away things. Sharing a bit of ourselves, opening a window into our own world, is a good place to begin. Volunteering at underprivileged schools, being mentors and sponsoring a child’s education are a few steps which we can take as individuals to help a child living in such extreme poverty.

It is a unique and humbling experience to help a child accomplish his dreams and become a part of a journey out of poverty. We can enable them to experience the fullness of life and help them to escape the grinding cycle of poverty that traps them and give them a home, an education and a hope for a better future. There is no fulfillment quite as satisfying as dedicating a portion of our lives for the betterment of society and for the less fortunate. The power of volunteering takes us to places within ourselves that we would never have occasion to discover otherwise. It’s is a two-way street. No matter how much you give, you always get something in return.

The best way to change a child’s life is to change the world in which they live. One such success story of a former street child is Amin Sheikh. He was a homeless child, a beggar, a rag picker, a factory worker, a vendor on a train, a boot polisher, a tea-shop waiter, a newspaper delivery boy all before he turned 16. He ran his own newspaper vending business, worked as a household attendant with a family that came to adopt him and now operates his own one-man tourist cab company in Mumbai and is the author of a self-published autobiography, which has sold 8,000 copies around the world.

Satender is another success story who once lived in Delhi as a street child and now is a volunteer at a non-profit that provides shelter, education and healthcare for street children in Delhi and Mumbai. A third success story is Vikas who was once a child laborer. Today he is a high school student with a hope for a better future through the sponsor a child program of World Vision.

At times it might seem like an impossible challenge; there are too many of them to help. Yet knowing that they are out there and the intensity and magnitude of the suffering these children endure daily should compel us to do something. As Mother Teresa said “We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop”.