The Government of India, through SSA and other initiatives, has been able to work with state governments and citizen groups to expand significantly the availability of primary schooling at the doorstep of most children in the country. But there remains a stubborn core of children that an even more expanded network of schools would not be able to bring into school, even if the school is at the neighbourhood of where the children live. These are children who survive in the most difficult circumstances, and face formidable barriers to schooling. These include disabled children, children of migrant workers, children in conflict and disaster areas, children of stigmatised parentage (e.g. scavenger communities and sex-workers), rural working children and urban street children. This Handbook engages with one category of such excluded children – street children. Every child growing up in India has today a fundamental right to good quality schooling. The street child should enjoy this right no less than any other child. But in reality, children of the street face extraordinary challenges to access their fundamental right. They are homeless, may have no family, or may have run away from abusive and violent homes. They work to survive in the most unsafe and unsanitary street based vocations, ranging from rag-picking, selling goods at traffic lights, begging, casual sex work and sometimes petty crime. Children who are forced to make the streets their only home are among the most vulnerable of all children, as they are deprived of the protection of homes and the nurturing of responsible adult protection. An unmet challenge of both governments and social organisations has been to reach food, protection, education and healthcare to these most disadvantaged children who share our cities, who we see every day, but who we mostly turn away from, without caring. Street children in these most difficult situations can access their right to education only when their other rights are also simultaneously ensured: their right to protection, food, health care and childhood. For a homeless child, this is usually possible only in residential schools. Every city needs hundreds of such residential schools for street and other urban deprived children, like migrant children. It is only recently, that the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, crafted a detailed scheme to reach these urban deprived children though residential schools and hostels. At last, state governments and social organisations have geared up to undertake; six decades late, massive efforts to ensure the fundamental rights of these children. In order to assist all state government, local bodies and social organisations to take up this massive challenge, we have prepared a series of detailed Handbooks dealing with various aspects of working with street children, from understanding their specific vulnerabilities and strengths, meeting them on the streets, managing Sneh Ghars, bridge education, mainstreaming, and life education, mental and physical health care, and legal issues.
Harsh Mander Director, Centre for Equity Studies, Delhi 1st Jan, 2012 2