Sonu, Toofan, Bobby and Bhagwan are skinny boys with impish grins and the mischievious ways of children everywhere. But for them, there has been no childhood.
Wily and street smart, they live and survive in a homeless, hungry, lonely and often brutal world circumscribed by New Delhi Railway Station. They scrounge for leftovers from the garbage of incoming trains and dodge the kicks of angry porters as they hustle to carry luggage for a few cents.
There are hundreds of others like them around the busy station, and millions more elsewhere in India, where the population is nearing 850 million.
"About 120 million children, including those helping their parents in farms and shops, are working more than 12 hours a day to earn their own bread, 55 million of them in slavelike conditions," said Swami Agnivesh, a former civil servant who has devoted the last two decades to the cause of freeing bonded laborers. "In this country there are children branded with hot irons and made to work 18 hours a day."
In overpopulated South Asia, where one-third of the children are born malnourished and there is never quite enough food to go around, childhood "is not school and play but misery and oppression," said Prem Shankar Jha, a columnist for the newspaper The Hindu and press adviser to the former Prime Minister, V. P. Singh.
At New Delhi station, 30 boys from 5 to 16 years of age are getting a rare chance to change their lives. On a small roof terrace of the railway police station, Bela Sumanth, a social worker, runs the Nukkad Center, an experiment in informal education paid for by the Salaam Balak Trust, a fund set up from the proceeds of the film "Salaam Bombay" by Mira Nair, a story of Bombay street children. Nukkad means "street corner" in Hindi.
Are they future of INDIA????????
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