Delhi station is a dangerous magnet for street children. But they can be set free. Martin Wroe reports.

Every day they arrive. They have no tickets, no place to go and they can be as young as seven but Delhi is their city of dreams and where they begin life living on the streets.

Javed’s story is emblematic: when he was eight he ran away from his family’s village in rural Bihar and jumped the Delhi train. He lost his schoolfriends and fellow runaways during the night, waking up alone and confused as he was pushed off the train onto the platform in Delhi – the start of four years living on the streets, largely in and around the sprawling railway station itself.

Today he is studying at the University and hoping to become a tour guide. Already he is gaining invaluable experience, thanks to the Salaam Balaak Trust which helped him off the streets and now supports him in their ‘City Walks’ programme – a way for former street kids to show tourists the other side of life in a huge, developing world, metropolis.

 "Four hundred children arrive here every day," he explains, as he takes a group of eight holidaymakers on a 90-minute tour of the station. "They are forced to run away because of poverty. Perhaps they have been orphaned or been beaten by their parents. They think of Delhi like it is a Bollywood movie, that they can come here and be a movie star."

Javed himself says that being beaten by teachers at school was one of the triggers which made him and his friends decide to run away. "I told my family I was going to school and I had my satchel but I caught the train instead. When I woke up during the night I couldn’t find my friends and I was very scared when I arrived here. I never saw my family again for eight years."

For different periods, he lived in other parts of the city, but he always came back to the station, with its combination of informal jobs, shelter and a ramshackle – if hazardous – form of community. "For a long time I used to sleep on top of the Juice Bar and if the cops came up you could say that you worked for the juice bar. You’d make friends with other traders too, like the chemist – kids can’t afford medicines but if they're sick the chemist will give them what they can afford."

But it is a perennially dangerous environment says Javed, pointing across the roofs over one of the platforms: "I had a friend who fell off that roof and was electrocuted on the tracks."

The huge water tanks at one end of the station, he explains, are home to different gang leaders. "When new kids arrive gang leaders compete to recruit them, they want them to become their pickpockets on the station – if they are girls then they are targeted by pimps. Each of the 12 platforms has a gang leader so when you are crossing you have to be careful or you will get attacked. I was so hungry once that I went to another platform and I was badly beaten."

Salaam Baalak Trust runs five shelters for children providing "security, a sense of home, and an opportunity to receive all the critical inputs of childhood". It was Trust team members who persuaded Javed that life could be better than living on the railway station. "I was standing by the tea stall one day when some people came up to me and wanted to know if I had run away. They told me not to be scared, that they were not social workers. ‘Eventually after a few hours I agreed to look at the hostel they were saying I could stay in – and when I saw the kids there – playing, eating, watching TV – I decided I could go there too."

Now studying, he also helps out with the Trust and as a former street kid is in a unique position: 'Street kids don’t trust anyone because everyone has exploited them but I have lived where they are living and I can speak the language of the street, I can persuade them to come to one of the shelters. I have persuaded many children not to stay on the streets.’ Salaam Baalak Trust trust was set up to rehabilitate children who acted in Mira Nair’s film Salaam Bombay, which chronicled the daily lives of street children in Mumbai. Today the Trust "provides support for street and working children (including)… education, basic literacy and schooling, full care facilities for the young, drop-in shelters, nutrition, health care, family planning, AIDS awareness, TB prevention, counselling, banking facilities and remedial drama.’

More information