In India, a bank for street children
Run almost entirely by the youths, a bare-bones bank sponsored by a charity offers a place to stash meager earnings and learn about saving and planning.
NEW DELHI — The bank manager's tone was crisp and efficient.
"Name?" he asked.
"Amit," came the reply from beneath a grimy white baseball cap.
"Father's name?" asked the manager, 14 years old and all business.
"Sanjay," said the customer, 13.
With his identity thus established, Amit Kumar Tripathi withdrew 330 rupees, or about $8.25, from his savings account, which Ajay Singh Choudhury, the skinny manager, fished out of a drawer, handed over in a wad of rumpled notes and dutifully recorded in a ledger almost as big as his torso.
Then it was on to the next boy in line at one of the more unusual financial institutions in India's capital.
Run almost entirely by and for street children, the bare-bones bank sponsored by a local charity offers the youths a safe place to stash the bits of money they earn picking through trash for recyclables, hawking magazines and fruit at intersections or busing tables at wedding banquets.
India is home to the world's largest population of street children, conservatively estimated at 10 million.
Their lives are far removed from the country's growing image as an economic juggernaut powered by software engineers and ornamented with Bollywood babes. Theirs is a parallel world of struggling to survive, a world where adolescent angst is about whether another meal comes your way, or whether you can sleep through the night, unmolested, on a hard patch of pavement.
In New Delhi alone, more than 100,000 youngsters live on the streets. Many remain with their poverty-stricken families, but thousands do not. A large number cluster around the city's main railway stations -- heavily trafficked areas where they can sell their wares and where passengers leave behind detritus they can pick through.
Boys scooting between train tracks, darting in and out of newly empty railway carriages, are a common sight. Many are harassed or beaten by police officers, or sexually abused by predatory adults. A fair number resort to sniffing glue. Some beg, others steal.
Many of these "railway children" are runaways who have come to the Delhi metropolis to escape abusive households or the monotony of life in the countryside.
Rohit Kumar Prasad, a sweet-faced 13-year-old who wears a silver talisman of the monkey god Hanuman around his neck, said he fled nearly two years ago from his home in the impoverished state of Bihar, in eastern India, because his father beat him.
