New Delhi: Fourteen-year-old Suresh was found loitering at the Sarai Rohilla railway station by a team of the Kingsway Camp based Child Welfare Committee (CWC) way back in May 2018. He had left home at Etawah in Uttar Pradesh after his father died of illness and mother committed suicide.
The CWC team and the district child protection unit coordinated with the Railway Children India (RCI), an NGO working towards the rehabilitation of such children. After persistent efforts by RCI, Suresh was finally provided shelter in a long-care children’s home near Kanpur in August last year.
The home in-charge warmly received him and assured that he would be admitted to a school to continue his studies. Now the boy is enrolled in Class 9 and wishes to complete his schooling to become an outreach worker so that he himself can help more children who have faced similar situations in their life.
Like Suresh, Habibul Sheikh, an 18-year-old resident of Kathalberia in South 24 Pargana district in West Bengal, dropped out of school when he was nine years old to support his family of six. He worked with his father to supplement his household earning till he met one of the volunteers of one of RCI’s supported NGO working in the area.
The volunteer advised him to attend the aspiration-mapping workshop organised by the NGO to identify vulnerable youths for enrolment in vocational training. Habibul was selected and immediately got enrolled in tailoring training in August 2017.
Like Suresh and Habibul Sheikh, a child arrives every five minutes at a railway station in India. Many of these children, who come in contact with Indian Railways, are abandoned, trafficked, homeless, or have run away from their homes where they suffer poverty, violence, abuse, and neglect. A survey conducted by RCI in 2015 indicated that 1.8 lakh children arrive at around 32 stations across all 16 Railway zones every year who need support and care.
Since RCI’s establishment in 2013, the organisation has protected 12,041 children from immediate dangers at railway stations. During 2017-18, RCI worked at nine railway stations in different railway zones across five states protecting 3,627 children, out of whom 313 were girls.
Their programme models at railway stations include 24x7 outreach, child help desks (CHDs), open shelters, and restoration of children back to families or government homes.
