Helping India's Street Children
Part Two of a Series on the 'Pavement Dwellers' of Mumbai

In the second part of his series on the "pavement dwellers" of Mumbai, India, Julian Crandall Hollick talks to Jockin, a man who is trying to help the kids who live on the streets and who make their way by collecting and selling recyclables.

Jockin Photo: Martine Crandall-Hollick

Jockin has what could be considered counterintuitive ideas about how to help these kids. Hollick asks: "What would our goals be? Get them back into school? Teach them some skills so they can earn a living, develop some self-esteem? And try to reunite them with their families? Jockin says those are great ideas, but they contain one major flaw."

Too many social workers, Jockin says, try "to make the other person (fit) into their own system, their own value base. Their own understanding."

"In other words," says Hollick, "liberal social workers invariably try to make street kids into their own image. They try to give them middle class values, and it simply doesn't work."

Celine D'Cruz Photo: Martine Crandall-Hollick

In this second installment of a four-part series called "Sadak Chhap" ("Stamp of the Street") Hollick tells the tales of the people who are trying to help the "ragpickers" who were featured in the first part. Parts three and four will air on Weekend Edition Sunday over the next few months. Each looks at a different aspect of the lives of the young "pavement dwellers" in a neighborhood in Mumbai.

Another social worker, Celine D'Cruz, concurs with Jockin. "Most of these childen are at the bottom of the recycling industry," she says. "And I don't understand why we can't treat that as an important job. Why is looked at as something that needs to be changed?"

Hollick says that such an attitude is "something we may be able to endorse in the abstract. But in reality, it's a lot harder."

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Other Resources

•Pictures and text to go along with the "Sadak Chhap" series.

•The entire "Apna Street" series can be found at Hollick's Web site.

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