Rescue and Restore Children in Ghaziabad

Every 5 minutes, a child arrives alone at a railway station in India. The survey conducted by RCI in 2015 indicates that 121,860 children are arriving at and around 32 stations across all 16 Railway Zones every year. These children constantly face all sorts of risks, even death, while living at and around a railway station.

Ghaziabad Railway station is part of Northern Railway. It is estimated that 3-4 children arrive alone and at-risk every day. A recent baseline study confirmed that a majority of children are coming from Katihar district of Bihar (50 %) followed by UP (28.6 %) and West Bengal (14.3%). These children migrate unsafely from these states to Delhi for various reason like attraction to cities, employment and peer group influence, deciding to leave families due to abuse situation using trains in their travel.

Children travelling from Bihar, UP, Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh by trains into Delhi pass through/halt at Ghaziabad. This junction is also being used by traffickers as an entry point to Delhi. Hence Ghaziabad is an important point of outreach as almost all the trains to Delhi halt at this station

Recognizing the severity of the issue, Railway Children India (RCI) has started working at Ghaziabad Railway station in January 2018 Through this intervention, a 24 *7 outreach is done where children alone and at risk are identified within 25 minutes of their reaching the station and brought under the safety net. Since January 2018 to December 2018, we have protected 546 children out of which 336 children supported through the open shelter. Over the next five years, we aim to project 2160 more such children and sustainable restore them back eight to their families or long care homes.

- Reach out to 2160 children arriving alone and at-risk at and around Ghaziabad railway station and sustainably rehabilitate 1728 children either to their families (70%) and long care home (10%) by 2020.

- Provide need-based counselling, support for de-addiction (2% of the protected children) and re-enroll them back into schools (25% of the restored children).

- Follow up with rehabilitated children to see that the conditions that were responsible for children leaving home do not occur again, imply family strengthening programmes.

• 8148 Children have been protected from June 2017 to November 2018.

• 5680 children have been reunited with their families.

• 303 children have been restored to a Long term care home.

• 4753 children have been enabled access to formal education

• 567 youth have been linked with vocational training

• 187 children received de-addiction support services

• 1497 vulnerable families have been linked to Social Protection Schemes

• 14747 Government Railway Police and Railway Protection Force personnel have been trained on child protection issues.