BackBabu, 11: Boy in wasteland
He picks Delhi's waste, goes to a school, lives like an adult and thinks like a child. Meet the street child with hope
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Babu has divided his life into three phases. “First, I stole and gambled. Then, I became a garbage picker. Now, I go to school."
How does he explain how he got here—that his father drank himself to death, his mother, a domestic help, abandoned her eight children, including 11-year-old Babu, leaving them to fend for themselves, that almost all his friends are thieves or thieves-in-the-making, that the oldest member in his family is just five years older than him, that unlike other children his age, his day starts at 4am.
Babu talks about picking garbage in the past tense. He says hesitantly, “The other children in school make fun of me...keep shouting kabaadi kabaadi (garbage collector) when they see me. So I do it only when they cannot see me doing the job."
But why can’t he just go to school? “You need money to survive. Money, job, they don’t come walking to you. You have to struggle," he says. Babu’s teenage sister works as a domestic help, his two brothers, also teenagers, are sweepers in a bank, the eldest brother got married and moved out, two younger siblings are too small to go to school yet. Babu and another brother, Suresh, who is a year younger, go to school.
Last year, Babu became part of Chetna’s (Childhood Enhancement Through Training and Action’s) campaign Street To School—an attempt at sending and retaining 250 street children in schools in west Delhi. The campaign started off with a one-year plan, but it is being taken forward. Delhi has 51,000 street children. Around 51% are illiterate, 87% earn a living—20% as rag pickers, 15.8% as street vendors, 15% by begging, according to a 2011 study, Surviving The Streets: A Study On Street Children In Delhi, by the non-profit Save The Children.
“The idea is to sensitize students, to make them accept street children in the classroom, to make street children aware of the importance of education, to ensure their retention in schools. It is difficult to convince teachers that education is the right of these children," says Usha Justa, the Street To School project coordinator.
On paper, free and compulsory education is a fundamental right in the country. The Right to Education Act, which came into force in 2010, with the then prime minister, Manmohan Singh, claiming that all children, irrespective of class or gender, are legally entitled to free education. The social reality is different, says Justa. But that is a much bigger fight. Babu is not concerned about that yet.
For an average 11-year-old, life revolves around home, playground and school. Babu already lives like an adult. He is responsible for his own survival and contributes part of what he earns to the family’s expenditure. At 4.30am, Babu, like many other waste pickers, leaves home in search of vendible excess.
Most waste pickers like Babu are migrants from West Bengal, Assam, eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. His family migrated two decades ago from Jhansi, Uttar Pradesh. Carrying a big plastic or gunny bag on his back, Babu picks waste from a footwear factory, a spice factory and a clothing factory. He sifts through the waste till 10am, then rushes back home, has a breakfast of whatever is available to eat, and by noon, is off to school.
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A few years ago, in the park outside one of these factories, Babu saw some swings. He wanted to sit on them. His parents (his father was alive then and his mother was with them) stopped him, telling him not to waste time. So he decided to join many others in his basti (colony) who went to pick up garbage from the factories around the park. “It is a dirty job. It doesn’t give you anything," he says, sighing in hopelessness.
Babu is shy, conscious of his surroundings and the clothes he is wearing. He brushes off even a thread stuck on his grey pants. His arms and face are sun-tanned, his hair well-oiled; there is a watch on his wrist, which he fiddles with while talking, and two silver-coloured rings on his thumb, which are noticeably loose. These, his daadi (grandmother) has said, will protect him from bhootpret (evil spirits).
Flipping through his school notebooks, Babu insists he will read out the names of colours, and not fruits, as I had asked him to. P I N K is Brown for him, B L A C K, Red. Justa says: “The first step is to enrol them in schools. Expecting them to excel in schools is too much to ask for. The challenge right now is to retain them in schools." The target of this project is 500 students and 250 have already been enrolled, 20 from Babu’s basti.
“While going to school is important, if the environment at home is not conducive for studying, how will it make any difference in the child’s life? If there is no one to take care of the child...if he has to work to feed himself...if he is surrounded by people who are consuming drugs...if he is not even accepted by the other children in school, how will he study?" asks child right activist Bharti Sharma, a former chairperson of the Child Welfare Committee, Nirmal Chhaya.
According to a June 2015 study by the Delhi Commission for Protection of Child Rights on Substance Abuse By Children In Delhi, the majority of children abusing substances were boys in all the categories of children surveyed—children in need of care and protection, children in conflict with law, and those living in community. In all, 1,500 children were surveyed.
To reach Babu’s home, midway in a row of several jhuggis in a west Delhi slum, you have to pass through trash-strewn lanes filled with empty bottles, old chappals (slippers), candy wrappers and sludge.
There is not much Babu has to say about this locality except that he wants to leave it. “People fight for every little thing, everybody drinks. And drugs are easily available." Recently, he found out that a boy in the locality had hidden ganja (drugs) in his house. Babu immediately informed the police.
Has he ever done drugs? He wouldn’t answer.
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On returning home from school in the evening, Babu goes to sell the waste he has collected to a scrap dealer. It’s late by the time he returns, he doesn’t get the time to look at his school textbooks. He says his life so far has been full of kaand (mayhem). Last year, Babu was arrested for theft. “It was bad company," he says, then adds that money was an issue. “Why do people steal? Because they don’t get jobs and then have no way to survive," the 11-year-old says. He stopped because he was caught, not because he thinks it is wrong.
“We can’t blame the child. He is basically a survivor in a cruel world, in which he has faced deprivation and abandonment. When a person is surviving like this, he does not have a holistic personality development—which ideally includes the ego, the super-ego and the Id. In this child’s case, his super-ego, which is the moral part of his personality, hasn’t developed much. Role models and any kind of self-discipline are missing from his life. What he wants is a change in the surroundings in which he is growing up," says child psychologist Bhavna Barmi, who is also senior clinical psychologist at Fortis Escorts Heart Institute in Delhi.
On good days, Babu earns ₹ 200. On some days, he earns nothing. Babu says he has no idea about life outside his slum. He doesn’t know what his dreams are. He doesn’t know anyone who is well-educated. He doesn’t know what well-educated means. All he wants to do, he says, is study to become a “bada aadmi (big man)", because then perhaps he will write the kind of stories his Sir ji reads out in his classroom.
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