CB BureauFor them, everything is temporary. Their job, their house, their village, their city or state and even the relationships that they build at the stations they work at. They have no assets and whatever they build just shatters when they move in the cheapest mode of transport available, in the search and hope of greener pastures… From farms to quarries to construction sites, thousands of migrant labourers across India are on the move and so are their children, who are, of course, unfortunate enough to be born to parents who just cannot afford to be with them always, as their daily-wage work does not allow them to do so.
Since both parents work, their children grow up in the rubble, playing between dangerous machinery and equipment, negotiating open digs and pits, and never seeing the inside of a school. Sometimes, mothers are forced to go back to work a few days after delivery, leaving their infants in the care of their older siblings, who are barely a few years older.
It was compassion for these underprivileged kids that formed the basis of Mobile Crèches. It is a result of indignation at their plight and the determination to make a change.
Mobile Crèches (MC), born on a construction site, provides a safe and nurturing shelter for the children of construction workers, right next to their hutments, right there on the building site. The mothers drop the children off in the morning, reassured in the knowledge that the little ones would be fed, washed, put to bed, cared for and loved, while they toil in the sun.
The logo of MC captures the whole story of Mobile Crèches: an unskilled female worker carrying a headload, a school-age girl who wants to study, and an infant in a baby-hammock who needs care. The woman worker carries the load of multiple responsibilities — managing home, raising children and earning a living through unskilled, casual work. The interconnectedness of the lives of women, girls and babies is self-evident. A critical link in the development chain is access to childcare services — enabling the young to blossom, their older siblings to go to school, and their working mothers to earn a wage, thus, nurturing three generations with one crèche.
In 1969, MC intervened in the lives of all three by setting up childcare services for the children of migrant construction workers at large construction sites in Delhi. Then on, MC has cared for at least 650,000 children, trained over 6,000 childcare workers, and run more than 550 daycare centres.
What sets MC apart from other organisations working with children is the dual focus on the young child and the migrant child. Mobile links them to the migrant and Crèche binds them to the infant.
The MC centre at work sites and slums works as the hub-training ground and springboard, and the Crèches worker the lynch pin, the caregiver, communicator and mobiliser. MC uses this springboard to scale up its reach in the long run by advocating policies, laws and programmes with corporate partners and governments, and training childcare workers from the community, other NGOs and state-run programmes, to create childcare alternatives as well as enhance quality of services.
Mobile Crèches’s interventions range from awareness building on early childcare issues through nukkad nataks across Delhi and setting up of home-based crèches in the slums to facilitate community-based childcare arrangements, for tussar-reeling women, as far away as the remote villages of Jharkhand, and providing policy inputs to the Planning Commission.
The first centrally sponsored crèche scheme, the National Crèche Fund, and in 1996, the passage of the Construction and Other Building Workers Act, were a consequence of joint advocacy with other organisations and networks working on child, gender and labour issues. Yet, crèche is a small initiative for a country whose nearly 50 per cent of population is poor.
Will the story of the migrant worker on the margins of the city, epitomised by Balraj Sahni in Bimal Rai’s Do Beegha Zameen, get replaced by the travails of the NRI migrant in New York and London? Or, is there hope that the CWG 2010 will not be another Asiad ’82?
Text source: Ritinjali.org