Street children live in Howrah Station (you can see some under the bridge)
Bijoy, who works in Calcutta Hope's Boys' Home with some street children
Bijoy with a street child
Some children run away when an adult sees them
“According to UN sources there are up to 150 million street children in the world today. Chased from home by violence, drug and alcohol abuse, the death of a parent, family breakdown, war, natural disaster or simply socio-economic collapse, many destitute children are forced to eke out a living on the streets, scavenging, begging, hawking in the slums and polluted cities of the developing world.
Various categories of street children exist. There are those who work on the streets as their only means of getting money, those who take refuge on the streets during the day but return to some form of family at night and those who permanently live on the street without a family network. All are at risk from abuse, exploitation and vigilante or police violence, but the most vulnerable are those who actually sleep and live on the streets, hiding under bridges, in gutters, in railway stations. While they may have small jobs such as shoe-shining or market-selling to pull through, many also end up dying on the pavement, victims of drugs, gang rivalry and disease. Without some form of basic education and economic training, the future is bleak for these street children and their life expectancy terrifyingly low.” UNESCO.
For an informed discussion you can visit the web site of the Consortium for Street Children of which Calcutta Hope is a member.
You may like to read ‘At the Margins: Street Children in Asia and the Pacific’ by Andrew West (2003)
Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark wrote about street children and how SEED work with them in the Guardian of Saturday 16 November 2002.
We don’t have any of our own video clips but ‘street children calcutta’ on YouTube has some moving results.
