#FairStart for Every Child to Curb Persisting Inequities

What? 
#FairStart For Children

When?
Wednesday, May 25

Where?
UNICEF HQ, New Delhi

#FairStart for every child to curb persisting inequities is a great initiative taken by UNICEF India. The 'Fair Start' film unveiled by the organization as part of a social and social media campaign has drawn the main attention to a chronic disease of our society which is about inequities being faced by a large section of children in our country impacting their survival, development and growth severely. 

Children from various backgrounds participated in this impactful film that gives an insight into the lives of children who have tremendous potential but get fewer opportunities to grow up healthy and safe due to their environmental and societal issues. They have very less chances to attend school and to gain formal learning. They have higher chances of getting married as children.

Caroline Den Dulk, Chief Advocacy & Communication, UNICEF India stated that every child must get a fair chance in his/her life and deserves adequate nutrition, safety, protection, education, health care, and emotional growth. This campaign is focused on these purposes and it aims to draw attention to the lives of many children across the country who are deprived of these fundamental rights, often at times concluded simply based on where they are born. Every child in this country, and on this earth must get a fair and equal amount of opportunities  in life, irrespective of their ethnicity, gender, caste, region, or religion. Girls in India deserve an equal chance in life too, but on an average 2.22 million girls marry early every year in India, and 23% girls between 15-19 years of age experience physical or sexual violence.

The 'Fair Start' film has been produced with the participation of  group of children from various segments of life who brought their own real life stories to the film set. These kids played cast and crew themselves with the help of professionals in film, arts, and acting. The crew included Sahil, Cameraman who learned the art and tricks of shooting from some known professional. Sahil is just fourteen and wants to be a successful cricketer in his life. He studies in an English Medium School and helps his uncle in laundry work. He has his mother and a sister at home.  His father passed away 3 years back.

We also met Suraj, 10, Art Director, and Belinda, 13, Costume Designer.  Suraj has three sisters and two brothers. His mother is having a hard time selling corn. He prefers to help his mother at her work as and when he is able to. His father is an alcoholic and fights at home. Suraj has an ambition of becoming a scientist when he grows up. 

Belinda goes to a municipal school. Her brother Shawn is Cameraman/Director of this film. She works at home after school hours. She aspires to becomes an accounts executive when she grows up. Shawn, 15, has six siblings. His father left home many years back and mother is not keeping well for quite sometime. That made him to mature up fast and take the responsibility of his family. He decided to work and earn money for his home. He cleans gutters to make his earnings. He aspires to go to school as he is not able to due to his circumstances. He loves playing football. He is very helpful and caring by nature whereas his sister Belinda is shy in nature. 

The message of #FairStart is quite clear. Everyone has to share the responsibility in sharing the message, spreading it across communities and social media, doing whatever possible in this regard, and participate in the activity. It is not going to bring results in a short span as it involves a change in mindset and acceptability. Giving a chance to these kids brought out wonderful results from them at such a young age. The same holds true for all other children who are craving for a fair chance in life. 

Stolen Childhood Of A Lost Spring...

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Rag Picking. 

An activity which strangles in its clutches, innocent children. 

Children who have no choice but to confront the demon of hunger, abandoning their dream to study.

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Yet, there are some children whose hearts long to embrace the angel of knowledge. 

There remains an unanswered prayer, a hope to be freed from the shackles of labor. 

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It is this suppressed desire which longs to obtain a medium of expression. 

It is this want, which is nipped in the bud. 

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Whenever the thought of such children crosses the mind, I am reminded of a stolen childhood. 

Lost Spring, penned by Anees Jung, is narrated thus. 

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'Sometimes, I find a Rupee in the garbage'

“Why do you do this?” I ask Saheb whom I encounter every morning scrounging for gold in the garbage dumps of my neighbourhood. Saheb left his home long ago. Set amidst the green fields of Dhaka, his home is not even a distant memory. There were many storms that swept away their fields and homes, his mother tells him. That’s why they left, looking for gold in the big city where he now lives.

“I have nothing else to do,” he mutters, looking away.

“Go to school,” I say glibly, realising immediately how hollow the advice must sound.

“There is no school in my neighbourhood. When they build one, I will go.”

“If I start a school, will you come?” I ask, half-joking.

“Yes,” he says, smiling broadly.

A few days later I see him running up to me.

“Is your school ready?”

“It takes longer to build a school,” I say, embarrassed at having made a promise that was not meant.

But promises like mine abound in every corner of his bleak world. After months of knowing him, I ask him his name.

“Saheb-e-Alam,” he announces.

He does not know what it means. If he knew its meaning — lord of the universe — he would have a hard time believing it. Unaware of what his name represents, he roams the streets with his friends, an army of barefoot boys who appear like the morning birds and disappear at noon. Over the months, I have come to recognise each of them.

“Why aren’t you wearing chappals?” I ask one.

“My mother did not bring them down from the shelf”, he answers simply.

“Even if she did he will throw them off,” adds another who is wearing shoes that do not match.

When I comment on it, he shuffles his feet and says nothing.

“I want shoes,” says a third boy who has never owned a pair all his life.

Travelling across the country I have seen children walking barefoot, in cities, on village roads. It is not lack of money but a tradition to stay barefoot, is one explanation. I wonder if this is only an excuse to explain away a perpetual state of poverty.

I remember a story a man from Udipi once told me. As a young boy he would go to school past an old temple, where his father was a priest. He would stop briefly at the temple and pray for a pair of shoes. Thirty years later I visited his town and the temple, which was now drowned in an air of desolation. In the backyard, where lived the new priest, there were red and white plastic chairs. A young boy dressed in a grey uniform, wearing socks and shoes, arrived panting and threw his school bag on a folding bed. Looking at the boy, I remembered the prayer another boy had made to the goddess when he had finally got a pair of shoes,

“Let me never lose them.”

The goddess had granted his prayer. Young boys like the son of the priest now wore shoes. But many others like the ragpickers in my neighbourhood remain shoeless. My acquaintance with the barefoot ragpickers leads me to Seemapuri, a place on the periphery of Delhi yet miles away from it, metaphorically. Those who live here are squatters who came from Bangladesh back in 1971.

Saheb’s family is among them. Seemapuri was then a wilderness. It still is, but it is no longer empty. In structures of mud, with roofs of tin and tarpaulin, devoid of sewage, drainage or running water, live 10,000 ragpickers. They have lived here for more than thirty years without an identity, without permits but with ration cards that get their names on voters’ lists and enable them to buy grain. Food is more important for survival than an identity.

“If at the end of the day we can feed our families and go to bed without an aching stomach, we would rather live here than in the fields that gave us no grain,” say a group of women in tattered saris when I ask them why they left their beautiful land of green fields and rivers.

Wherever they find food, they pitch their tents that become transit homes. Children grow up in them, becoming partners in survival. And survival in Seemapuri means rag-picking. Through the years, it has acquired the proportions of a fine art. Garbage to them is gold. It is their daily bread, a roof over their heads, even if it is a leaking roof. But for a child it is even more.

“I sometimes find a rupee, even a ten-rupee note,” Saheb says, his eyes lighting up. When you can find a silver coin in a heap of garbage, you don’t stop scrounging, for there is hope of finding more. It seems that for children, garbage has a meaning different from what it means to their parents. For the children it is wrapped in wonder, for the elders it is a means of survival.

One winter morning I see Saheb standing by the fenced gate of the neighbourhood club, watching two young men dressed
in white, playing tennis.

“I like the game,” he hums, content to watch it standing behind the fence.

“I go inside when no one is around,” he admits. “The gatekeeper lets me use the swing.”

Saheb too is wearing tennis shoes that look strange over his discoloured shirt and shorts.

“Someone gave them to me,” he says in the manner of an explanation.

The fact that they are discarded shoes of some rich boy, who perhaps refused to wear them because of a hole in one of them, does not bother him. For one who has walked barefoot, even shoes with a hole is a dream come true. But the game he is watching so intently is out of his reach.

This morning, Saheb is on his way to the milk booth. In his hand is a steel canister.

“I now work in a tea stall down the road,” he says, pointing in the distance. “I am paid 800 rupees and all my meals.”

Does he like the job? I ask.

His face, I see, has lost the carefree look. The steel canister seems heavier than the plastic bag he would carry so lightly over his shoulder. The bag was his. The canister belongs to the man who owns the tea shop.

Saheb is no longer his own master!

~~~ 

This post is a part of Write Over The Weekend, an initiative for Indian Bloggers by BlogAdda.

For Birju, With Akshaya Patra...

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Hello, I am Birju.

My Hunger Has No Color, Nationality, Religion and Choice.

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Hunger is not a choice for the poor, even poverty is not. Hunger is struggle within, against nobody and everybody, logically against oneself, for that sake. It is a war to kill the basic necessity of food with the weapon of anti-necessity. It is a war that I never initiated, neither did I ever wish for it to happen in my life but it was a war, waged itself the moment I landed on this earth. In fact, the war was already there, which my family was part of, and hence I had become part of it too.

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I have never had the blissful experience of being 'full-stomach'. For us, it has always been starving and craving for food. More hunger, more craving. More craving, more hunger. It became a vicious circle in this small world. A never ending one. I am 15 now and I don’t know how it tastes like, and meaning of what people call as ‘sumptuous’. My childhood's definition can be encapsulated in three words – hunger, hunger and hunger.

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I always wonder why God takes away wisdom when He endows poverty. My Baba thinks that a bottle of cheap alcohol will satiate his hunger but it has never happened. Rather the meager amount of money that he earns during the day by driving an old rented rickshaw, goes into his bottles rather than a square meal a day for the family. For that purpose, my elder sister and mother – both have to work as house - maids in the nearby locality, boasting of richer people and bigger houses. And, that is how we are able to run our house – the minimal needs fulfilled.

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Neither me, nor my siblings are educated; nor our parents. I wish to learn so that I am able to fill the gap of Wisdom and Knowledge in our lives and do away with this paltry lifestyle, we are enduring through. I wish to improve our standard of living to an extent that I earn so much that none of my family members need to work. But education – yes, I would like all my siblings to get educated and learn – so as to be able to stand on their own feet.

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I hope, someday God listens to my humble prayer, so that I am not forced to choose between my education and hunger, with the demon of hunger boasting of an upper hand, every single time.

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I am going to #BlogToFeedAChild with Akshaya Patra and BlogAdda.