k Trust (SBT). Started by Mira Nair, the director who made the movie Salaam Bombay in the 1990s, SBT works with runaway children who leave home due to abuse, poverty, abandonment and make their way to the streets of New Delhi in search of a better life. Each day approximately 30-40 children arrive on the platforms of the New Delhi railway station. Many of the girls are immediately picked out by canny predators for a life of prostitution and the boys end up living on the streets. SBT is committed, along with the Delhi Police and other Indian governmental programs (ChildLine 1098), to rescuing as many of these children as possible, providing medical assistance, daytime food, and short term shelter, attempting to reunite them with their families if they can be traced and if the child wants it, providing long term support like education and a home for the children who cannot be reunited with their families.
Salaam Baalak Trust receives about 40% of its funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), 50% from individual, private donations, and about 10% from the Indian Government. Recently, the USAID grant ran out and SBT is looking to submit applications to continue the funding.
SBT also functions as key partner with the Indian Government as part of the ChildLine Program, by serving as the social worker service center for the Central Delhi Zone (one of 86 such service centers nationwide).
We spent the bulk of our site visit participating in a tour provided by Iqbal, a young man who was himself a runaway child and was picked up by the Salaam Baalak Trust. Iqbal now functions as a roving ambassador with the SBT City Center Walk Program and conducts tours for visitors among other activities. Iqbal took us
through the process a runaway child undergoes from arriving at the Delhi railway station to encountering SBT services through Contact Centers, some of the street life options the children experience such as working as ragpickers for the recycling industry, spending their money on video games or movies, getting into smoking and drugs, and finally joining a shelter home and abiding by its strict rules.
Our visit to a short-term shelter to meet with the 80-90 children living there temporarily was the most heartbreaking part of the site visit. The children range in ages from 4 to 18. The older children sat by the back wall of their classroom, quietly observing the strangers in their midst. Many of the younger children were still young enough to be excited about engaging with the GWU students, playing with our digital cameras, taking photographs, playing hand games, and generally talking a mile a minute and loudly sharing stories with us! The very youngest children were somewhat shy but had the sweetest expression
s. All it took was one smile or an outstretched hand and they immediately responded with faces wreathed in smiles. Coming from a culture of plenty and a throwaway society, it also gave one pause to see these children in relatively good spirits despite their somewhat meager living and school conditions.
This experience was one of the saddest ones of the trip, it alternately brought out feelings of frustration and anger that children could be betrayed by their own families out of desperation and largely by society. But it also was one of the more hopeful encounters in that at least some of the children were being rescued and looked after and even supported in their educational endeavours till they were old enough to stand on their own two feet. It also demonstrated how some of the children, like our tour guide Iqbal, over the years are able to get past some of the traumatic feelings and positively contribute to SBT by supporting younger children who newly join the SBT fold.
One wishes the social conditions which give rise to the unbearable home conditions of these children could be eradicated, that all these runaway children could be rescued and helped, that these shelters and homes offered by organizations like Salaam Baalak Trust could offer more services and more spacious conditions, like more extensive counseling, anti-smoking and drug prevention programs, improving public health and environmental conditions, and that the revenue streams could be more stable to ensure continued quality of services.
A striking point was how artistically inclined and talented many of the children are and how one of the most common themes of their art was that of a beautiful home in serene surroun
dings. One hopes the children have in some measure found some sense of home and serenity in Salaam Baalak Trust and that they all find or eventually have their own dream homes where they feel safe and secure.
Visits to institutions like Salaam Baalak Trust also help reinforce the need for social entrepreneurship models and new ways of looking at things to tackle some of these intractable social problems. In a sense they provide the impetus for courses and study abroad opportunities like ours at GWU and challenge us to think of ways in which to apply our academic public health training and knowledge based on real-life ground conditions.
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