I am certainly not an expert on the subject of street life in India, but one of the most fascinating parts of my work with SBT has been learning about street kids…how and why they end up on the streets, how they survive and how they overcome what they’ve been through. In this blog post, I’ll attempt to share what I’ve learned.

The biggest reason kids end up on the streets boils down to one word…Poverty. The kind of extreme poverty that these kids have endured is the kind of poverty that those of us in the first world can’t even imagine. Poverty leads to harsh conditions in their villages, harsh conditions in their homes, drug use, domestic violence and abuse, hunger, death of parents, lack of education etc.  Most of the kids that live on the street have run away from these harsh conditions, often at very young ages.  I’ve met boys who left home as young as 5 years old. They hop on trains to the big city expecting a better life. Other kids are simply lost during a big festival and forced to figure life out on their own.  India is full of festivals and families often travel to other cities for the festival.  In cities with 20 million + people often the kids get lost.  Again, for us this sounds unimaginable…just contact the police and have them call your family…right??!  Well, most people don’t have phones or even addresses. These kids barely know the names of the villages they come from. The child is simply lost in a country of nearly 1.3 billion people.  Some kids are approached by people visiting their village promising them a better life so they follow these people to the city.  Those kids are often trafficked, sold as laborers, or used for begging once they reach the city.  I’ve also met kids that were simply abandoned by their families.  Left to fend for themselves.  No matter the reason, it is tragic that this is such a terrible problem in India.

Once the kids have reached the city, they begin to do work to earn money.  Usually they do ‘rag picking’.  This is the term used for people who go through the trash and pick out the recyclable material.  They take the recyclable material to a recycle facility where they are paid.  They usually earn about 200 rupees per day.  That’s around $3.15/day.  They also steal and pick pocket.  They don’t spend their money on food as in India they can go to a “Gurdwara” for free food.  A Gurdwara is a Sikh Temple.  Sikh Temples provide free meals to everyone both rich and poor and no one is turned away.  So the kids spend their money in two ways…drugs and entertainment.  About 90% of kids that live on the street use drugs.  They primarily sniff glue.  They can buy glue very cheaply and they put it on a handkerchief and sniff it.  They are also CRAZY about Bollywood movies and video games so they spend money watching movies and playing games.

They often form mini families on the streets.  Groups of 2-5 kids that live and work together and look out for one another.  This is how they survive.  Once they get a taste of freedom and become addicted to drugs it is very difficult to persuade them to join a shelter home and receive help. Even though they are living on the streets and sleeping around the train tracks and other dangerous locations, these conditions are usually not much harsher than what they had at home.  So not having parents who beat you, always having enough to eat, friends to hang out with, drugs to use, movies to watch etc doesn’t seem so bad. For some of these kids they feel this life is better than the life they left behind.

The problem with this belief is that there is an even better life waiting for them if they will accept help from organizations like Salaam Baalak Trust.  More on SBT and how they do their work in a future post…