The Wrong Side Of The Tracks

On a recent trip to Kolkata I spent a couple of hours sat on a train outside Howrah Junction, one of the city’s main stations, waiting for a platform to become free. These kinds of delays are a regular occurrence in India, and each time a train stops groups of children who live alongside the railway tracks jump onboard to try to earn a few rupees from the passengers by sweeping the carriages, singing and busking or simply begging.

The children I saw were no older than eight or nine, but I should probably count myself lucky that they weren’t any younger. In one case reported by Times of India last month, a seven-month old baby boy was found abandoned onboard a train headed for Howrah – and the man who found him was told to keep him.

That’s right – its finders-keepers on children in India, with railway officials refusing to even make loudspeaker announcements and the police attempting to locate parents who may well not want to be located. It makes you wonder whether the many children in India who have to fend for themselves have anyone looking out for them at all.

Cities like Kolkata have particularly high numbers of street children due to increasing urban populations and rural-urban migration. In Kolkata’s slums, large numbers of people live without access to basic services such as sanitation, safe drinking water, shelter and education. With or without parental care many children end up in bus-stands, railways stations, markets and roadside pavements. They often fall into hazardous forms of work including begging and rag-picking and are at risk of becoming victims of trafficking.

Although the Indian government has expressed concern for the welfare of these children, there remain serious doubts over whether they have the capability to deal with the number of children who don’t live with their parents, or who do but still need an income to survive. The estimates of how many children there are working in India varies from the official statistic of 12.6 million to a figure of at least 50 million used by many human-rights groups. Nevertheless, in recent years the government has taken several steps towards outlawing child labour. In 2006 they extended bans on children working in dangerous professions to cover households and the hospitality industry, and in 2009 they introduced their biggest legislative effort yet: the Integrated Child Protection Scheme.

The scheme has grand plans, and in places like Kolkata it should theoretically facilitate the opening of shelters where children could spend their time in a safe environment. Their basic health and shelter requirements would be met and vocational training could also be provided. The scheme also aims to encourage sponsorship, foster care and adoption with the aim of keeping as many children as possible within families. As Sujata Mohanty, Project Director of the Taskforce on Alternative Child Care, said at a recent district level consultation on the Scheme in Orissa: “All children have a right to a family.” She added: “Institutionalisation should be the last resort.”

The Taskforce on Alternative Child Care is just one of the civil society agencies to whom the government has delegated much of the vast task of actually implementing their scheme. This multiplicity of actors could prove to be the scheme’s biggest weakness. As with the railway officials who said that the missing boy was “not their concern”, the fact that there are so many agencies and government bodies involved makes it easy for people to pass the buck on difficult cases – because in the end nobody wants to be left holding the baby.

Making Sure Disability Counts

Ever tried counting to a billion? India is attempting it this month as it rolls out its 2011 census, the first since 2001. “Never before have we tried an exercise of this scale,” said Palaniappan Chidambaram, India’s Home Minister. “In fact, nowhere in the world has a government tried to count, identify and issue identity cards to more than a billion population. This is the biggest exercise, I believe, since humankind came into existence.”

As an indicator of what a mammoth task this is, there are two and a half million ‘enumerators’ fanning out across the country this month to collect the statistics in person. There are a good fifty countries in the world that don’t even have that many citizens in total, or to put it another way, there are eight times more civil servants working on this thing than there are people in Iceland. That is, as they say, a lot.

It’s a remarkable operation designed with the best of intentions. As the Census Commissioner C. Chandramouli put it: “The census is a means of evaluating once in every 10 years, in a dispassionate manner, whether government programmes are reaching their intended target and plan for the future.” I hope he’s right, but it’s worth bearing in mind a truism that has been repeated since the 19^th Century - that there are three types of falsehoods: lies, damn lies and statistics.

One person who shares my concern about the mendacious nature of seemingly authoritative facts and figures is Ajit Kumar Behera of Swabhiman, the Odisha State Disability Network. He believes that there was a huge discrepancy in the number of disabled people counted in the census figures of 2001 which led in turn to severe underfunding.

According to those figures, around 2% of the Indian population is disabled. To put that in context, the UK census put the number of disabled people at around 17% of the total population, which is roughly the same as the USA and Canada. The World Bank link here goes some way to explaining why these numbers seem so far apart, and suggests that “a worldwide estimate of about a 10-12% rate of disability seems reasonable.”

Behera agrees with this estimate, and says it chimes more accurately with his experiences in the field than the official figure of 2%. So what happened to all the disabled people who weren’t counted?

The simplified version of Behera’s answer goes like this: if there were ten people with hearing problems, but the government only had two hearing aids to give out, then only two people could be given them. When the census was conducted, only the two people with hearing aids were counted as having hearing problems, so eight became ‘invisible’. The government then uses its own census data to decide that next time around it only needs to provide enough resources for two people with hearing problems, and so the cycle continues.

The 2011 census represents a once in a decade opportunity to affect the way that the Indian state allocates resources, which is why Behera is campaigning hard to raise awareness of the importance of identifying disabled people correctly on the census.

I recently visited Nayanamate, a 17 year old who was born with both cerebral palsy and severe epilepsy and who lives in Bariguda, a small tribal village made up of fewer than 70 houses in a rural area of Orissa. It is physically and psychologically a long way from Delhi, and her mother and grandmother told me of how remote they feel from the support of the Indian government. In making such gigantic strides to count and identify their citizens, India should also be taking a small but important step towards understanding who in the population needs their help most. That’s what really counts.