Most children left home for Mumbai in distress

MUMBAI: For children new to the city, home is far away. It is not so much the geographical distance, but the way they left – in distress. Some alight from outstation

MUMBAI: For children new to the city, home is far away. It is not so much the geographical distance, but the way they left – in distress. Some alight from outstation trains with a small bag of clothes, others, empty-handed.

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Some take to begging outside stations and inside local trains, while some fend for themselves by working at tea stalls and vehicle repair shops. Luckily, Samatol Foundation, a city-based NGO has been rescuing children for 14 years now. It has come to the aid of at least 10,000 children in need.

Eighteen children were reunited with their families in Thane after being away from home for more than a month. Anxious parents sat looking at each other nervously. No one spoke. Their eyes remained glued to the door. When the children walked out, the parents could not hold back their tears.

Megsham Reddy, 14, left Andhra Pradesh when his father remarried. He was four when his mother killed herself. Now a student of Class 8, he was reunited with his father.

Gautam Siddique,13, ran away from his aunt’s house in Navi Mumbai as he wanted to study but his aunt did not let him go to school. He left with nothing but the clothes on his back. Boarding a train, he ended up at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. As Siddique was hungry, he sat and begged until he collected enough money to buy a vada-pav. The NGO’s volunteers noticed him there. “Didiko bataya mujhe padhna hai (I told the volunteer I want to study). They brought me to the shelter home. I will finish my studies and become a social worker,” Siddique said.

The NGO targets major railway stations across Maharashtra, where outstation trains arrive. In Mumbai, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus and Mumbai Central are selected, Kalyan and Thane on the outskirts and then at Pune and in Bhusawal. They have four shelter homes in Thane, Kalyan, Pune and Bhusawal. The NGO plans to start tracking children at Nanded railway station too.

Bajrangi Kumar, 15, is now a reformed child. Earlier, he did not have an interest in studies, dropped out in Class 6 and took a job at a local garment factory in Bihar. Four months ago, Kumar started smoking. “Kumar used to drink and take drugs. He came to Mumbai with friends. We found him at CST,” said Lata Wankhede, a volunteer.

Kumar was reunited with his father. He now sports a cropped hairstyle and clean clothes. “I will not touch bad things,” he said.