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Wastepicker Children Face Discrimination from Private School in India, June 20, 2008

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AdvocacyNet
News Bulletin 144
June 20, 2008
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Wastepicker Children Face Discrimination from Private School in India
 
June 20, 2008, Delhi, India: In a graphic example of the deep discrimination that faces India's urban poor, a well-known private school in Delhi has refused to admit seven wastepicker children out of fear that they might carry diseases.
 
The children, aged 6 to 8, spent months getting ready to enter the Salwan School at Pusa Road with the encouragement of a teacher there. Then, an hour after they had met the principal, they received an unwelcome phone call. The arrangement was off.
 
"It is scary to find that an educational institute would do this," said Bharati Chaturvedi, Director of Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group. "It tells us how intuitive and deep the discrimination against wastepickers runs, and the enormous barriers they face just to be treated as human beings."
 
Chintan, a Delhi-based partner of The Advocacy Project, had helped the seven children (six girls and one boy) to gain entrance to the school. Following the rebuff, the group is advising them to continue their studies in government schools, where they have faced taunting from teachers and other children because of their status as wastepickers.
 
Wastepickers scour through open trash bins for recyclable paper, metals, glass and plastics, which they then sell. According to Chintan, they account for almost 1 percent of Delhi's population and handle about 20 percent of the city's waste. They earn, on average, one or two dollars a day.
 
Although the Indian government has banned child labor, the poorest children often pick waste because they have no other means to support themselves and their families. Paul Colombini, an AP Peace Fellow volunteering with Chintan this summer, saw this first-hand recently when he visited the Seemapuri wastepicker community.
 
"Whole families typically work together in the waste-picking business, and most wastepicking children are not able to attend school," Mr Colombini wrote in his blog. Even when they can attend school, he wrote, the children face discrimination: "Teachers were known to not allow them in classes on the assumption that they were illegal immigrants."
 
As wastepicking children move through the city collecting garbage, they are bullied into cleaning private homes, beaten by municipal sweepers and police, and sometimes even sexually assaulted, according to Chintan.
 
The work also exposes the children to germs, toxins, and injuries. A Chintan study found that 84 percent of wastepicker children are anemic, and that more than 22 percent suffer from four or more health problems.
 
Chintan tries to turn these child laborers into full-time students through a program known as "No Child in Bins." Chintan runs four learning centers in Delhi, and reaches out to about 300 wastepicker children.
 
The seven children who sought admittance to the Salwan School had all been recruited into Chintan's learning centers from the slums of Takiya Kale Khan and Nizamuddin. They then went on to government schools, where they excelled despite the taunting, according to Ms Chaturvedi.
 
Their families put up with considerable hardship to help them move to the next level and gain entrance to Salwan, a top private school. The children were preparing to take an entrance exam when school officials abruptly changed their minds.
 
Ms Chaturvedi criticized the school's actions as akin to caste discrimination. "In all this, one thing is clear," she said. "If we want to get children out of work and into school, we must change attitudes, and invest in changing these."

• Read the blogs of AP Peace Fellows Paul Colombini and Mackenzie Berg.
• Learn more about Chintan's No Child in Bins program.

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