Aditya chatterjee's Weblog

This is regarding my experience while traveling in train. It was festive season and I was going to kolkata from Chennai. The reserved compartment was full of passengers. I am not going to give more importance on the train but am going to say some thing what happened inside the train. Yes, I am talking about the child beggar.  Well, may be I can call it as child labor as well as child begging.

Two kids of around 12 & 9 got in the train from some where of Andhra Pradesh. They were in rags. The smaller one was standing and the elder one was on his knees. The smaller one started to beg for money while the elder one stated cleaning the train floor. People showed their ignorance and rough behavior.  There were some people who gave them money. I was wondering if any way I could help those kids. There are so many organizations available that take care poor children. Before I could do any thing they moved on to another compartment. Now the question is what I should have done?

Being a not so active member of a NGO, I should have taken the initiative but then I was on my way back home. I was in a region where people don’t speak my language. My broken Telegu can’t be enough. I did nothing to help them but I didn’t encourage them to clean the floor. We always speak against child labor but in some other way we encourage them. Let’s take the example of other passengers in my compartment.

There was a couple with a 10 year old boy. How they would felt if someone has showed pity on their son? But that didn’t stop them to show pity on those kids. They gave some thing around a rupee to kid and continued their work. I bet, they never bothered about those kids otherwise why that one rupee? If the couple felt for that boy they could have given at least 50 rupees to the boy for his lunch or dinner. NO, they didn’t because they didn’t bother. Then why this encouragement?

Let’s talk about another passenger who was of his mid thirty accepted that he can’t see children begging! This guy felt emotional and gave some five rupee to those kids. I do respect others emotions but if he was that much touched by child labor then he should not encouraged it. Rather giving money to the kids he could have helped any children home.

More over behind the screen of child begging there would be none other than those kids’ relatives. Unless we change it from the root level nothing is going to change. More over we need to stop encouraging the begging. Hopefully things will change soon.