Collecting old plastic bottles for rice

Every day, nine-year-old Angeena is woken from her plastic sheet bed at 4.30am by the sound of traffic before heading off to scour the streets for car parts and recyclable rubbish.

Despite her age, nine-year-old Angeena is already one of the family breadwinners, and earns 25 to 30 pence a day by collecting bottles, polythene packets, paper and scrap iron.

“I am covered in black grease,” she says. “But I am used to it.”

Like the estimated 50,000 other street children in the Indian city of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), Angeena is pretty grown up.
She has responsibilities on her small shoulders.

The meagre amount she and her mother bring back buys enough rice, potatoes and oil to provide the evening meal for her mother, father and four sisters. “If it is impossible for us to collect waste, we do not get anything to eat for dinner,” she explains.

"My Parents are so poor and do not encourage me. But I am determined, one day, to go to school." Amina, aged 12.

Home is a plastic sheet on a pavement in front of a row of shops, while such luxuries as toilets and running water are unimaginable.

“We have been encouraged to use the public toilets to improve hygiene, but you have to pay for these,” Angeena says.

The police use threats and force to move people either to slums or the outskirts of the city. Sometimes homeless people are put in badly maintained, government-run “beggars homes” – or even jailed.

“All the evictions are carried out at night. The police throw away our possessions and beat us up, even women and children,” Angeena explains.

Together with another 500 street children, Angeena attends one of 19 informal education centres set up by ActionAid partner organisation The Kolkata Samaritans.

As well as teaching her basic literacy and numeracy, the centre gives Angeena the chance to sing, dance and play with other children.

“It is difficult and tiring to follow the same dull routine every day,” she says. “But my life has begun to change since I started going to the activity centre.”

Because they are born on the streets and have no official address, the authorities refuse to acknowledge that children like Angeena exist. And without a birth certificate, she is not allowed to attend school.

ActionAid are working hard to provide children like Angeena with birth certificates, and to try to ensure they get some education while waiting for their existence to be officially recognised.

ActionAid have also set up 35 children’s groups across the city, in which young people are encouraged to share their experiences.

Although she is ignored and bullied by the authorities and the vast majority of Kolkata residents rushing about their daily lives, Angeena, like any other child, can’t wait for her birthday party.

But she is also determined to ensure that she gets the chance to stand up for herself and her right to be an Indian citizen.

“Life is not always smooth sailing,” she says. “But I am confident to stand against all odds.”

photo : ©ActionAid