The Other Railway Children, Chapter 6 (extract) "More India Stories"

The charity in 1996-7 was virtually unknown outside the UK railway industry. The fact that we operated in partnership with other NGOs who actually delivered the services, both abroad and in the UK, made it even less likely that our name would be recognised. Basically, at that time we were a grant-making body acting as a conduit for funds from donors in the railway industry to local NGOs, albeit encouraging them to focus on my vision of early intervention to protect and offer options to new children on the street before they could be exploited, abused, corrupted and traumatised by their experiences. Then in 1998 a train of events would change our role to add greater value to our intervention, to become a true child development agency.

It began with an audacious and, in hindsight, a very optimistic application for a grant from the UK national lottery. Although we were only three years old, the trustees endorsed my suggestion that we should apply to the National Lottery Charities Board for support for work in India. I drafted and submitted an application for almost a quarter of a million pounds (over 3 years) to develop our partnerships, encompassing the running costs of our joint programmes with CINI Asha in Sealdah, Calcutta, Sarjan at Ahmedabad and three new potential partners. Two of these were developed through my association with a nurse from Cork, Edith Wilkins, who was Assistant Director of CINI Asha and in charge of some 23 individual projects in their urban street children programme.

She took me to Howrah station the far side of the Hooghly River opposite Calcutta city where the Indian railway network branched from the sprawling station to points west and south to the rest of the Indian sub-continent. The 25 platform station hosted its own city of street living people, and many children – perhaps as many as 300-400 at any one time. Many would be coming in daily from the slums to earn money through informal trade, scavenging and begging. Others were children who’d drifted to the station years previously and found opportunities there to survive carving out their territories for their commercial – often illegal – activities and maintaining a tenuous relationship with the railway authorities and police – often through corrupt means. Then there were the newly arriving runaways from the hinterlands, children running from physical and sexual abuse, or attracted to the city to try to earn more than they could ever dream about in their rural villages. Estimates have been made that major stations like Howrah, New Delhi and VT station in Mumbai could receive as many as 20 or 30 newly arrived children in each station per day.

Edith introduced me to one local Indian NGO working at Howrah, named SEED, led by a devout Moslem, Sadre Alam, which was opening up a project for a group of 30 young girls who’d been discovered sleeping rough on Howrah’s platforms. The youngest of these girls was four, the oldest thirteen. They’d all been raped or sexually molested on the station, several as a result were HIV+ and they were working in the local slum community during the day – an area made famous by the book and film ‘City of Joy’ (Anandnagar). SEED had managed to obtain the loan of a classroom of a small private school five minutes’ walk from Howrah station and every night at 6pm two social workers (‘aunties’) employed by SEED would open the emergency shelter up, greeting the young girls with water for a wash, clean clothes and a hot meal. Afterwards, they would provide health care and advice, some basic education and an opportunity for these young girls to play and dance. After sleeping safely there, the girls would go back onto the streets in the morning as the school needed its classroom back.

Early in 1998 Railway Children had begun to fund this project and I was invited to the opening. A group of white robed elderly males was seated at the top table with the girls sitting cross-legged on the floor and a few local adults sitting full of curiosity at the back. After a number of speeches which I could not understand as they were in Bengali, I was invited to say a few words which Edith translated for me. My efforts were greeted with guffaws of laughter from the children and I was a little taken aback as I was unaware that I had cracked any jokes! Edith told me afterwards that the children were laughing at her execrable Bengali!

During the further speeches one young girl crawled out and plonked herself on my lap and promptly fell asleep. This was seven year old Babli. Edith told me that she had survived by fetching water for the slum community from the nearest standpipe a kilometre away, eight hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year for the princely sum of one rupee a day on which she was expected to survive. When I make school visits to talk about street children now, I often call for a seven year old girl to try to lift and carry a bucket of water across the hall or classroom, and rarely do they manage more than a few paces before we have to stop in case I’m in trouble with the teachers for flooding their school floor! In later years SEED was able to lease a building nearby to house the girls that wanted to leave the street and go to school, and many years later the Railway Children office received an e-mail from Babli thanking us for ‘giving me my childhood back’.

The other Indian charity Edith commended to me was in faraway Andhra Pradesh in a city called Vijayawada, an important railway junction on the mainline route from Howrah to Chennai (Madras) and the far south, and the junction to the joint cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad, and to the Deccan plain. The NGO ,SKCV (Street Kids Children’s Village, but in reality an Indian language acronym) was founded by an English former street child, Matthew Norton, the son of a GP in Sale, Cheshire. Matthew had rebelled as a boy, had run away from home at 14 and lived the life of a hippy in the 1960s, hiding out in an old railway coach in the carriage sidings at Longsight just outside Manchester Piccadilly station. When the Beatles went to India in the late 1960s Matthew had followed them out, enjoyed the Indian lifestyle and had got himself a small flat in Bombay. There he took an interest in the street children, having been one himself, and began to help those he befriended on the street.

One night he was visited by two young boys one of whom was desperately ill, he got them treated in hospital and opened his home to other children from the street. The following night he had six children asking for help; by the end of the week twenty children were trying to share his flat! He decided to move to Pune to lease a larger and cheaper flat and the boys went with him. There he was discovered by other street children and eventually set up a project with a social worker called Bhakti whom he later married. Three years later he was approached at a conference by the mayor of Vijayawada who explained the plight of street children in that city, especially at the station, and offered land to Matthew if he would set up a project there.

I visited Matthew – the journey was an experience in itself. I’d been booked on a train from Howrah through to Vijayawada, a 24 hour journey, after my visits in Calcutta, but when I arrived at Howrah station I found chaos as the Bengali state railway staff were all on strike and no trains were running within the state of West Bengal. I took a taxi to the airport and managed to find a flight to Visakhapatnam, a naval city on the Indian Ocean coast an eight hour train journey north of Vijayawada. I got to the station about 3 o’clock in the afternoon and to my dismay, found that there were only two trains a day southbound, one leaving in five minutes’ time. I had no ticket, no reservation for this train and saw long queues at the ticket office (I had still not fathomed the mysteries of Indian train booking hall procedures). It was hopeless until some guy saw my obvious confusion and (for an appropriate tip) got me a ticket ahead of the queue and bungled me and my luggage onto the slowly departing train, putting my documentation into the hands of a travelling ticket inspector shouting at him to find me a berth. I duly arrived at Vijayawada at eleven o’clock at night eight hours before I was expected!

Matthew (he styled himself ‘Manihara’ in India) met me the following morning and showed me round his headquarters in the city – a night shelter for street children, a sick bay, a vocational training centre (with computer training as key) and small admin office. He then took me to the Boys’ Village on the banks of the River Krishna, on land given by the city through the mayor. Up to 200 boys were housed there – after three months’ regular attendance at the night shelter, boys were offered a place in the village if they wanted to leave street life and gain an education. The situation was idyllic and the day to day management, under Matthew’s overall supervision, was in the hands of fourteen senior boys, known as the ‘Future Group’. Bhakti was headmistress of the school.

Matthew had good relations with the city authorities, the local railway Divisional Railway Manager and Railway Protection Force, and with our help, set up a ‘Child Assistance Booth’ on the station, jointly with Childline India and about three other NGOs in Vijayawada with whom Matthew collaborated closely in a city ‘Children’s Rights Forum’. On the station I saw many young girls as well as boys and Matthew expressed concern about their risk of being trafficked into domestic or sexual slavery – girls from the slum communities out of school faced the same risk, and Matthew asked if the Railway Children could find funding to set up an emergency shelter for such girls as he had previously done for the boys. We therefore included an application for this and for the SEED girls’ shelter in our lottery application.

The final project we included in this first application was a small programme in Tamil Nadu called ‘WORD’. I’d received out of the blue an application from a man called K.B.Samuel for support for shelters for children on stations on the metre gauge railway line between Katpadi Junction (Vellore) and Villupuram on the main Chennai – Madurai route. The project plan seemed to fit exactly what I was trying to achieve in the charity and I had included it therefore in the grant application to the lottery. I duly travelled overnight by train and was met at Chennai main station by a very bewildered group who seemed very unsure of my purpose of visit. En route to WORD’s headquarters in the village of Polur, I discovered that the man who had applied to me for the grant for his programme had died suddenly the previous week and mystifyingly had said very little to his colleagues about his plans. However we continued – I showed the dead man’s brother and widow the correspondence and project plans and they committed themselves to take the project forward in his memory. Perhaps I was naïve in allowing this to go on, but their sincerity seemed so great and the widow – who was a senior grade nurse – and her brother, the local schoolteacher, were obviously highly committed and I took the risk. I advised the lottery board of the changed circumstances and agreed to reduce the size of the grant for this aspect of my application to some initial pilot work including the purchase of a suitable building as a shelter for the children.

To my immense surprise and pleasure, I found that my application for £225,657 had been approved and was available for starting the programme from June 1998. A couple of years later, a member of the lottery grants programme team visited WORD. The report was mixed – the children were being looked after with care and were happy and all was in order financially, but the assessment indicated that the NGO was complacent and had little forward vision to change the situation for such children on a wider scale. We were reminded that we had other more mature and innovative programmes and that we should use our position as partners of several to add real value and not just be a means of providing needed financial resources to projects. In essence, we should become a development agency using our experience and knowledge to strengthen our partners, facilitate networking and stimulate forward planning to identify the most effective ways of positively changing these children’s lives.

Our Board of trustees took this implied criticism very seriously and debated our future strategy at length, realising that in the three – four years of our existence we had gained considerable insight into the lives of such vulnerable children, both directly and through our involvement with other NGOs at the Consortium for Street Children. This lottery feedback report was important and was the catalyst for a major development of the charity.