Hyderabad: When 12-year-old Vinay (name changed) was rescued by the Labour department on June 19 last year, he was really happy — he would not have to work 16 hours a day anymore, as he was forced to at the bangle manufacturing unit in Talabkatta, and nobody would beat him up at the rescue home at Saidabad like his ‘malik’ used to do in the congested room he lived in with 13 other kids.
Indeed, after three months at the rescue home, he was looking healthier and spirited and officials called in his parents from Gaya, Bihar, and handed him over to them. That was when life turned upside down again for him within a few weeks.
In January this year, a team of East Zone police officials found him at an ice-cream manufacturing unit in Kacheguda, once again frail and dispirited after he had suffered torture at the hands of his employer for several weeks. Vinay told his rescuers that he had no option but to return to child labour as his parents were too poor to look after him. He was returned to the rescue home so that his childhood would not be wrecked again.
Deepak (name changed) of Nagaram was brought back to the boys’ rescue home for the third time this week. He had first run away from home three years ago, unable to take his uncle’s beatings anymore, and made the railway platform in Secunderabad his home, earning a meagre amount by rag-picking and using that money to buy cheap liquor and whitener, of which he quickly became an addict. Each time he was rescued, it was from the railway station. He never wanted to go back to his widowed mother and to school.
“I was scared of my uncle, and I did not want to attend school. When I go back home, I do not like it there,” Deepak said.
When police found him last time in January, he had severe burns on his legs, the result of an electrocution suffered after a misadventure with a fellow rag-picker.
Vinay and Deepak are typical of what happens to many runaway children and child labourers even after they are rescued and rehabilitated at the rescue home. As soon as they are out of it, they go back to their old habits, sniffing whitener, begging, and the like.
Although rescue homes counsel them, help them take up studies and vocational training, they are overwhelmed by their poverty, the adverse circumstances they sought to escape in the first place and the challenges of the world outside the rescue home.
“As far as the runaway kids are concerned, many of them are addicts of whitener and alcohol. They have strong bondage with the streets and railway stations, and they tend to go back to it all once they are released,” said an official of the Saidabad child rescue home.
“Unless these children are strongly motivated, and their parents strictly warned (against pushing them back into distress), there will be no change in their lives or their behaviour even after a long stay at the rescue home.”
