In Mumbai sometimes when I am out on the road, there are these small children who are begging. Sometimes I help them and sometimes I do not. It's not that I do not wish to help them but giving them money is like encouraging them to beg. I prefer to buy them some food or give them something which will be useful for them, like clothes. And there is always a doubt if these children are trafficked from other places and forced to beg. 2 decades back the number of children begging on the street was high in number compared to now. In Mumbai nowadays I do not find many beggar children on the streets.
Thanx to a lot of NGOs and social activist who are working on this issue in rescuing children from these gangs who steal them and then force them into doing wrong things. Some of these children are from very interior villages and they are sold off by their parents themselves, because the parents cannot afford to raise them. It's a bitter truth.
It's not even easy to tackle this issue because these gangs are very strong and it is impossible for an individual to put up against them. A strong group is needed to fight these gangs. The problem is that sometimes even the police is working with them and they may not take action if you go to them. It's all real and not just seen in movies.
I have worked with children in remand homes in past and there we have had all of these types of rescued children. They do not even understand many things; out of fear they just do what they are being told to. Their bodies and mind both are vulnerable. Some of these children have run away from home by themselves because of unhappy lives with their parents and then fallen into trap after arriving into bigger cities. Then there are some children who do not even want to go back home, and we try to place them in foster cares, which are also again overloaded.
It's a grave issue to deal with and I do not think that it will ever eradicate completely from a place like India. The evil behind all of this is money. For money these children are sold and for money they are forced to do things which they should not be doing. As a child if they have had such a background then it is very much possible that when they grow up they are going to do crimes and become criminals. And then we as a society will blame them. To think of it who has to be blamed? Why did we not take any action the first time we saw them in a helpless state.
As a society we do not understand that leaving children to this type of fate is only about creating an unsafe future for the whole of the society. If I see any such child, I try to be vigilant about who is around them and if I find it suspicious, I know of some NGO groups who are into rescuing such children, I inform them and then they do the needful. This is how I can help in my own way to create a secure future for the children.
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