The Other Railway Children, Chapter 11 (extract) "Street Girls"

We had known that the majority of street children around India’s railway were boys. However, there were girls, even if sometimes they were harder to find. We knew that some girls cut their hair and disguised themselves as boys to protect themselves from assault and rape. Other girls sought protection in the gangs of street boys but had to submit to sexual advances from the youths in return for their protection. One partner told us that the sight of girls up to the age of about ten was common on stations but after that they seemed to disappear - and feared that part of the explanation was the trafficking of such vulnerable girls into the sex trade or domestic slavery.

Matthew Norton, down in Vijayawada, had recognised this many years previously and had persuaded us to support an emergency shelter for girls in his programme. Saathi had catered specially for older girls in their Bombay programmes after research that we had funded. SEED and CINI Asha in Calcutta had both set up shelters for street girls - in fact a state census of street children had estimated that 47% of Calcutta’s street children were girls - a much higher average than anywhere else we’d found. Probably the majority of these were young children in the slums on the streets during the day, but for any that had left home, life was particularly tough and risky.

One partner that approached us about that particular vulnerability was Jeevodaya, a programme at a large railway junction in the centre of India, where the main trunk routes from Delhi to Chennai (Madras) and from Calcutta to Bombay crossed, the centre of a continental ‘X’. Around 140 mainline trains a day used Itarsi station and it was a railway town - the Crewe of India - with large electric and diesel engine maintenance depots, and not much else. A diminutive nun, Sister Clara, from a local Catholic order, had noticed the street children on the station and had led the nuns to set up a drop-in centre for children from the platform in a small railway building she’d persuaded the local Divisional Railway Manager to loan to her.

She’d been discovered by a British couple, Ashley and Jane Butterfield, who ran railtours round India and who had helped her build a residential home for the street boys. Railway Children had been supporting her with the running costs for a number of years and one day she drew our attention to the girls from the platform that she could take into the drop-in centre during the day but for whom she had no night shelter provision. She was extremely concerned for these girls, many of whom were vulnerable to trafficking, and had an ambition to set up a girls’ home on land adjacent to the boys’ home which happened to be for sale. However, the owner wanted nearly £30,000 and gave Sister Clara only two months to find the money as he alleged he had other purchasers waiting.

Although Railway Children rarely funded capital projects, we could see the urgency for Itarsi’s young girls, and sought a source for buying the land. The Butterfields put up £10,000 and I mentioned the need on a visit to the Waterside Headquarters of British Airways and a cheque for £10,000 was produced within 30 seconds of me completing my presentation of the case. The last £10,000 was a little harder to achieve and a loan was made to try to obtain the land before it was too late, but then the owner increased the ask and was making things difficult, so Jeevodaya found a much larger plot of land about two kilometres away and purchased that for the same price.

In the meantime the HSBC Bank had elected to fund street children programmes as their corporate social responsibility (CSR) project and the Indian branch made £10,000 available to complete the purchase and enable the loan to turn into a donation for the running costs. Sister Clara persuaded the Japanese Embassy in India to finance the construction of a large residential home on the purchased land and Railway Children, with part of the Comic Relief money, entered an agreement to fund the running costs.

Sister Clara decided to move the boys to the new home and use the boys’ home which was right by the station to house the young girls. This was because most of the boys no longer had contact with their families whereas many of the girls were from street dwelling families around the station, but at risk of trafficking and sexual abuse and rape. In that way the girls could be protected at night, be funded to go to school during the day, and still retain contact with their families.

I have visited Jeevodaya a couple of times and one of the Railway Children trustees, Brenda Klug, who worked for BA in India several years ago and became the Customer Services Director of Virgin Trains, took Jeevodaya to heart and makes regular visits there. Sister Clara is a remarkable woman - all 4’ 6” of her! She has persuaded her bishop - initially against his wishes - that she should remain in charge of the street children programme as her vocation and although she is helped by a couple of the nuns, the majority of her staff are Hindus or Moslems and there is no pressure on the children to convert to Christianity although her motivation and care is very much built on Christian principles.

She is widely respected by the railway authorities and police despite the fact that Christians are sometimes viewed with great suspicion especially in that state and when I visited the Divisional Railway Manager in Bhopal nearby, I received a glowing testimonial about her work. Because of the visits I’ve made I interested children at the churches in Nantwich and at a Roman Catholic Primary School in Leek in twinning with the children in Jeevodaya and from time to time there is an exchange of greetings, Christmas and Divali cards and photographs.

By 2007 the Railway Children programme in India had reached its maximum outreach through some 21 partners at over 50 railway station locations contacting between 20,000 and 25,000 children a year. However, we were beginning to ask more questions about the depth and sustainability of our outcomes - the long term changes in the children and how we could demonstrate and assure ourselves and our donors that the children we contacted had made a positive change to their lives.

We had decided a couple of years earlier to disengage slowly from the slum community children’s educational work and concentrate on the most vulnerable children - those whose family contact had been lost or was negligible. In a couple of cases changes to the leadership in our partners led to changes in direction or we came to the end of our funding agreement and decided that either the partner had sufficient resources from elsewhere to continue or that we did not feel that the interventions were strong enough to renew the partnership.

The work undertaken by the vast majority of our partners was carried out by devoted humble people determined to put the interests of these children first and do their very best for them with scarce resources and often in extremely trying conditions. Most of our partners appreciated the fact that we sought genuine partnerships where we shared ideas, opportunities and problems, carried out joint training and advocacy and were not just grant-makers wanting nothing but feedback to furnish our fundraisers with motivating stories.