An initiative worth sustaining

A cooperative programme, reportedly focused on helping street people, was recently launched at Dhaka's Osmani Udyan. At its inaugural function, the Dhaka Tokai Ghar Cooperative Samity Ltd, as the initiative calls itself, opened a 'labour bazaar', avowedly to facilitate employment for the target group. If this target group includes all adults, youth and children, it means the cooperative would have to choose from hundreds of thousands of rural migrants who stream into the capital annually for seasonal or regular income earning opportunities. More often than not, these environmentaleconomic refugees somehow fend for themselves without any self-professed do-gooders hovering over them. But a well-meaning and efficiently managed cooperative could certainly make life in the heartless city a lot easier for the dispossessed people. It is hoped the intention of the above outfit is geared to improving the lives of the migrants and not to serve some other hidden agenda. The plight of street children in Bangladesh, widely recognised as one of the world's most inefficiently governed nations, can well be imagined. According to a 2008 Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS) paper, there are 380,000 street children in Bangladesh, 55 per cent of whom are based in Dhaka. Nearly half the total number is in the under- 10 age group while the rest are 11 to 19 years old. Some 75 per cent of them are boys and the remaining one-fourth are girls. BIDS reckons that by 2014, the number of homeless children in the country might exceed 930,000. This may be a very conservative estimate for more than one organisation working with such children have been claiming much higher figures. However, cynics are not shy about suggesting that the figures might be deliberately inflated by vested interest groups to lay claim on more international charity and child development funds for their pet projects. Be that as it may, the fact remains that street children live under very difficult circumstances, haunted by hunger, homelessness, disease and the most horrific exploitation at the hands of criminals, drug peddlers, political mercenaries, immediate community and even law enforcers. One study as far back as in 2005 revealed that sexual abuse of street children, both boys and girls, is alarmingly common and one finds many getting drawn into addiction. A considerable number are engaged in potentially hazardous occupations: as welders, tannery assistants, construction workers, rickshaw pullers, transport helpers, domestics, bidi rollers and what not. The need for more programmes will not become less but more for the growing number of destitutes certainly need all the help they can get, and the authorities should see that it comes in the form of well-thought-out, sustainable projects that protect and educate them and develop their potential in ways that enhance their lives as rightful citizens of a truly people's republic. Two programmes that have long been working brilliantly in this specific area are the Underprivileged Children's Educational Programme (UCEP), set up by an European in the pre-liberation period, and Surovi, a comprehensive school for working children, established in the late 1970s or the early 1980s by one dedicated Bangladeshi woman, entirely with funds from family and friends.Both are still going strong and deserve replication if more and more destitute children are to be saved from the vagaries of life on the street.