The Other Railway Children Chapter 11 (extract) "Issues on the big Indian stations"

After the first filming of our partner’s work in India by the BBC for the Sport Relief 2004 programme, and the viewers’ response to the excerpts shown of a six year old lad called Subu and his recovery from the train fall, and of Vijay at Villupuram, Comic Relief called me and wanted to discuss a possible expansion of our programme in India. We were permitted to go for a full £1 million - the maximum allowed - over a four rather than five year period and build in particular on one of our learning experiences.

We had conducted situational analyses at three or four stations - including Howrah, New Delhi and Ahmedabad - to learn something about the children on the stations there - and had found that many of those without family contact had run from the northern states of West Bengal, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. Many of the arriving children at the mega city stations had already been travelling around the railway system for several months and were already beyond the point of ‘early intervention’ that we had tried to focus on.

If we were to be true to our objective of reaching the children in the first few days after they’d left home, we realised we needed to have a presence on stations nearer to the towns and villages from which they were running. We therefore supplemented our further application to Comic Relief with a proposal to look for two new partners each year of the grant in the northern states.

We had been working with an NGO called Prayas in Delhi, an organisation that had taken over a state run observation home for runaway and delinquent children after a series of bad experiences there that had been poorly managed by the state authorities. Prayas had been founded by a senior Delhi police officer, Amod Kanth, and had briefed our partners at an Railway Children Federation of India meeting on the requirements and opportunities under the new 2000 Juvenile Justice Act. Using his police knowledge and contacts, Amod Kanth had been able to persuade the Railway Protection Force to set up a ‘Child Assistance Booth’ on New Delhi station and a shelter for boys from the station nearby. Many children who needed a longer term residence and educational opportunities were found a place in the Prayas homein in a Delhi suburb. Prayas was prepared to open up new work in Bihar and we funded them under this second Comic Relief grant to start work in a large railway junction in Bihar, at Samastipur.

When discussing our work with the railway authorities or police one of the issues often referred to was the need for NGOs working at the bigger stations to work together and approach the railway management with a co-ordinated plan of working. At stations like New Delhi, Bombay VT and Howrah several city NGOs were working on or near the platforms and Railway Children tried, because of our contacts and relationships at senior level in the railways, to get these NGOs to co-operate with each other.

At Howrah we called a meeting of around six of the charities working with street children on the station and undertook a situational analysis there, identifying the varying categories of vulnerable children - the long term residents, the newcomer runaways, the local children whose families were around the station, the children commuting daily to find income from activities around the station. We surveyed the hours when most children were on the platform, which trains were used mostly by arriving street children and which NGOs had a presence, when and where. It was clear that benefit could arise if the organisations agreed to cover different platforms and hours to give more comprehensive support to the children, especially at night, and that as the children’s needs were different and the NGOs were strong in different activities, a cooperative system could work with children being referred to the NGO best placed to serve the individual need as appropriate. I’d seen such cooperation in Vijayawada through the partnership of that city’s NGOs in their Child Rights Forum.

However, it proved more difficult in the larger cities. Not all the NGOs we invited at Howrah came to the meeting and although those present found the discussion useful and said the right things, I can’t feel confident that as much progress was made as I had thought possible. At New Delhi at least nine NGOs were working around the station and it was even more difficult there. I managed to get all nine NGOs to attend a meeting together, but the different approaches and philosophy of intervention of several was very apparent. Although all had strengths and there would have been much to gain - especially for the children - by the NGOs agreeing to share the ‘child assistance booth’ on the station and referring the children to the most appropriate organisation, in fact two or three of the stronger organisations would not recognise the appropriateness of different approaches and again, although there was a paper commitment made to share and work together, the attempt was abortive.

There was much to learn here. We had conducted a situational analysis at New Delhi and found that despite the NGO ‘crowded’ presence, only 35% of the children interviewed on the station were in contact with these NGOs and only 15% actually used their shelter facilities. Many of the children, especially the older ones, could earn more money on the platforms than the NGOs’ street outreach workers who were trying to help them! The feedback from the children was that they badly needed protection from the violence they experienced there and help to escape from their addiction to intoxicants, both needs that the NGOs seemed unable to address effectively, although one of our partners, ‘Butterflies’ was perhaps the organisation trying hardest in this direction.

We have continued to work at both Howrah and New Delhi - we cannot ignore those important places - and continue to try to get NGOs to work together as far as possible but it is a difficult task for a number of reasons, some practical, some cultural and some because of different philosophies and values underlying their programmes. At another major station, Bombay Victoria Terminus (VT) now renamed Mumbai Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST), we have had more success. Partly this was because the difficulty of working in that environment was so great - the attitude of the police there and the amount of crime on the station - that NGOs found actually working together for mutual protection had its benefits.

A programme of co-ordination called Bal Prafulta by a major NGO, Don Bosco, was stimulated and funded by us and is working towards the joint benefit of all the stakeholders and children at that station, and I found on a recent visit (February 2011) that much progress is being made. We have a new partner at Howrah (Calcutta) also, Don Bosco, and I met the RPF officer in charge there and found he, in conjunction with our partner, had set up a co-ordinating child assistance booth in the centre of the main concourse there. So things are improving. However, the Delhi stations still present a challenge to us.