The Other Railway Children Chapter 9 (extracts) "Comic Relief"

The Comic Relief grant enabled Railway Children to make a sustained deepening of its work in India, assured now of a five years’ rolling programme underpinning between a third and half of our work there. We were developing a common pattern of early intervention by supporting Indian NGOs that had outreach through street educators and social workers on railway platforms and meeting key trains; obtaining rooms on stations or nearby to act as drop-in centres for street children and emergency night shelters; providing immediate child welfare needs - protection, food, health care; providing opportunities for child development through education - informal, mainstreaming to state schools or boarding schools; giving opportunities for vocational training for older children; and providing counselling and rehabilitation if a child was prepared to go back to a suitable home.

A number of key partners were included in this grant. Three were in the city of Calcutta where at one stage we’d had seven partners, although several of these were the slum settlements beside the suburban railway lines, where we had already ceased to partner a couple. CINI Asha was our longest standing Indian partner - a major player in the city in both health care for women and children in particular and with a large urban programme including street children shelters and drop-in centres. We’d started with the children in the red light areas, but had concentrated on the two shelters at Sealdah. At the end of platform 10 at Sealdah South station was an old signalbox which had been a street children shelter for many years, originally supported by the Irish NGO GOAL, but taken on by Railway Children in 1997. Anything up to 50 children could be found there daily squashed into the small space having informal school lessons or receiving food and general help.

From time to time the railway authorities would try to close the centre citing safety of the children as a reason - it was not the safest location, it must be admitted, with trains going in and out of the station just yards away, but it could equally be argued that without the shelter the children would be even less safe. More than once we had to call on help to save the shelter including on one occasion a local powerful politician Mamata Banerjee, later Minister of Railways in the Congress coalition government. Eventually the railways decided they would not allow the centre to operate there any more - the lengthening of the platforms was on their agenda - and they found us another and better building a few hundred yards away beside the carriage sidings. It was certainly more self-contained and safer, but a bit too far from the station to be a natural drop-in for the children and became more of a temporary residential centre for children who had become detached from their families.

The other drop-in centre at Sealdah was at the North station, a further dozen or so platforms separated from the South by a cart track - road would be too grandiose a word - alongside which was a room belonging to the Eastern Congress, the railway trade union. They had loaned the room to CINI Asha as a further drop-in centre for some of the boys who hung round the main line station. The role was similar though and CINI’s staff visited both and taught at the informal schools there as well as proving food and health care. CINI Asha had a number of other drop-in centres in the city for girls as well as boys, but they received funds from a number of sources and Railway Children concentrated on the two station shelters and their running costs and gradually weaned the programme off the other locations such as the informal education of children in the red light areas which was useful but not really within the particular role Railway Children had seen as its priority mission.

SEED was the second Calcutta NGO to be funded by the Comic Relief grant. I have described earlier the girls’ shelter that had rescued the thirty girls found sleeping rough on Howrah station, but SEED also had a boys’ drop in centre and with the grant we were able to help them develop a residential centre for boys undergoing education or vocational training before moving on home or into the community. I had watched one of the BBC TV series on ‘great railway journeys of the world’ and seen Ian Hislop taking the train from Howrah to one of the Maharajah’s palaces in Rajasthan and travel on the ‘Palace on Wheels’ special opulent train. Before he boarded the train in Howrah, a boy crippled by polio scooted by on a skateboard begging. Ian made a sympathetic remark about the boy’s plight and I wrote telling him about our work at the station. I was pleasantly surprised to receive a few hand scribbled words from Ian a few days later and a very generous cheque ‘for the street children of Calcutta’.

The third Calcutta NGO to receive funds from Comic Relief via us was an NGO called ‘OFFER’ at a large junction to the north east of the city called ‘Dum Dum’ where presumably the bullets of that name were invented. This station had a large number of platform children and we’d helped fund a residential centre for children there without family contact. The Comic Relief grant assisted the salary costs of the staff at the home and also the outreach work on the station which included the training of the two different railway police forces there (the RPF and the GRP - the Government Railway Police) - I attended one of the training sessions with 50 police officers although I could understand little as it was conducted in Bengali.

I had met Gerry Pinto, the UNICEF Child Rights Officer in Delhi on one of my visits and his wife, Rita Panicker, who had founded one of the better known Indian NGOs in the capital, New Delhi. ‘Butterflies’ ran a number of programmes for street children which strongly supported their safety and livelihoods on the street. Rita did not believe in institutional care except for the youngest and most vulnerable and provided the means of children surviving on the streets with resilience and a degree of panache. She had helped them form a street children’s trade union to protect themselves from exploitation and was later to develop a children’s bank. Railway Children got involved in supporting her ‘health co-operative’ which paid for a mobile clinic vehicle to visit roughly 1,000 street children weekly in their known locations including New Delhi and Delhi Junction stations. Those children that wished could join the ‘Health Co-operative’ by paying one rupee a month which entitled them to come to meetings to get health education and advice, using their power to request medical staff to tell them about health issues of particular concern.

In the state of Andhra Pradesh we drew SKCV further into the long term partnership and in particular used the Comic Relief money to fund the outreach work on the station and the night shelter two minutes’ walk away in addition to the girls’ shelter which we had funded from the lottery grant. Several of our partners including SKCV had become the local agents of Childline India, partly modelled on the example of the British ‘Childline’ organisation but with some important differences. The Indian ‘Childline’ would not only receive free phone calls but because they were run by local charity agencies instead of being just a centralised phone line, they could and did respond to calls by picking a child up and taking him or her to safety - a child possibly sick or injured, or beaten up or robbed or just lost. We funded SKCV to have a ‘Child Assistance Booth’ (CAB) at Vijayawada Junction station and five NGOs in the city, including SKCV, manned it on a shift basis daily. Currently Childline India is operating in more than 80 cities with several of them run by Railway Children’s partners.

The other major beneficiary of the Comic Relief grant was an NGO called ‘New Hope’ which had small emergency shelters on or near railway platforms in a number of locations up and down the East Coast main line from Kharagpur and Bhubaneswar in the north through to Visakhapatnam in the south and Hyderabad in the centre at the north end of Andhra Pradesh. Each of these shelters housed up to 25 boys and the aim was to manage their reliance on wandering on the railway and to rehabilitate them and get them home. When Comic Relief and the BBC wanted to film one of our projects for the Sport Relief BBC TV telethon, they chose New Hope and visited one of the shelters near Visakhapatnam and the ‘half-way house’ where children who wanted to go home were prepared.

The BBC filmed one of the boys - Vijay - who had run away from home at eight years of age because when he came home from school one day he found his mother crying as she had no food for the large family. As the oldest Vijay felt he must be a burden to her, so he ran away and survived for two years living on the railway until he was picked up by one of New Hope’s platform workers and persuaded to come into a shelter. There he was found suitable for home reintegration, his family was traced and his parents were keen to have him back, so he spent some time at the half-way house being prepared for his homegoing which coincided with the BBC visit. The comedian, Patrick Kielty, fronted the process and accompanied him home with a new outfit and money to ensure he returned to school and viewers saw the emotional reunion with his family.

Two years later the BBC and Sport Relief team revisited New Hope and wanted to follow up what had happened to Vijay. They eventually found him on Villupuram station in Tamil Nadu and were concerned that he’d run away again - but no. He wore a little badge saying ‘social worker’ because, after spending the mornings at school, he returned to the station in the afternoon looking for children to bring to the emergency shelter there. One of the distressing events the BBC filmed during their first visit was an accident to a young six year old boy called Subu. Subu was with a group of older boys on an express train while they were being interviewed for the programme when the train lurched and Subu fell through the open door (no locked doors on Indian trains!) at around 50 mph. The train was stopped and the film crew ran back expecting to find a corpse, but Subu was still alive though badly injured. They called an ambulance and paid for his medical care and in a few weeks Subu made a miraculous and complete recovery. He featured in the telethon film and as a direct result Comic Relief made an extra £30,000 available to Railway Children for medical expenses of its NGO partners’ children who sustained accidents on the roads or railways.