In the News

Helping them rise above their station
Sunday, February 11, 2007 22:19 IST

In 1985, when Inderjit Khurana started reading stories to the homeless children who live on the train platforms of Bhubaneswar, she had no idea how long her project would last. At first, only a handful of children came to her story circles to listen, learn, sing and perform dances, but as the group grew into dozens and hundreds, the Deputy Superintendent of Railways intervened, concerned about the size of the crowds.

“He was the boss, you know,” she says, “But when I met him and explained my work, he just said ‘I don’t know you, Mrs Khurana, and you don’t know me,’ and allowed me to do my work.”

Twenty-two years later, Khurana and her non-profit, Ruchika Social Service Organisation, anything but unknown. They now operate 12 platform schools, 6 nurseries, and 125 slum educational centers where they run HIV/AIDS programs and give vocational train for youth in Orissa.

Last week, Khurana was named one of three finalists for the 2007 World Children’s Prize for the Rights of the Child (WCPRC), an award that puts her in the company of teenage activist and Free the Children founder Craig Kielburger, who won the prize last year, and anti-apartheid crusader and former South African president Nelson Mandela, the 2005 winner. In April, Khurana will travel, along with a delegation of Ruchika staff members and children, to Mariefred, Sweden, where Her Majesty Queen Silvia will present the three finalists with their awards and an honorarium.

The other two finalists are Doctor Cynthia Maung, who runs a clinic for Burmese refugee children, and Betty Makoni, whose Girl Child Network provides protection and care to abused girls in Zimbabwe. They will divide $140,000 US dollars between them, in two grants of $55,000 and one of $35,000, which will go towards their organisations. The amount each finalist receives will be determined by a vote held among the children. “I said I wasn’t working for any awards. I’m working because I love it. I love making a change for the children, and I look forward to the day when they are change-makers themselves,” says Khurana.

Khurana moved to Orissa in 1977 with her armyman husband, and a year later started a primary school called Ruchika, where she says “hordes of children” used to wait outside the gates everyday. The school could not support them, so the staff began offering programs at the local railway station. At first, the railway project was just about helping the kids have some fun. “But the children began to ask things like, ‘Why can’t we read the stories? Why do you have to read them to us?’” says Khurana, “and that’s how the studying began.”

The railway program began teaching non-formal lessons in reading and math, but now these unconventional classrooms incorporate Indian history and geography into the curriculum. Many of the children travel regularly up the East coast from Orissa to Kolkata, working as sweepers, rag-pickers, and bottle-collectors. Others come from Kerala or Karnataka, and they learn to answer their questions about these places in their railway classes. Many of Ruchika’s children only study at the railway schools only up to standard III, at which point they are mainstreamed into government schools, if possible.

The prize money will be put in endowments and corpuses to boost Ruchika’s capacity to help its children. Too often, says Khurana, the organisation is left without proper resources to take the next step on their programs. “We hope that one day we will have enough money locked away into endowments that we won’t have to go begging for each project,” she says.