History

According to UNICEF India's population is over one billion and 55.5% of her people are living in slum areas. More than eleven million Indian children are living on the streets and more that forty million children are going to sleep every night hungry.

Seventeen million people are living in Mumbai and eight million of these live in slum areas. An estimated five hundred families arrive daily in Mumbai and try to survive in the overpopulated slums areas. When these people arrive they face other problems. Families can’t afford their basic needs and can’t educate their children. Children often travel alone to Mumbai from as far away as two thousand kilometers, dreaming of a better future. They are ignored by a system that is terribly overburdened and the children are soon left to fend for themselves and end up as prostitutes or sexual slaves.



Girls living on the street are particularly vulnerable.

There are five shelters in Mumbai (one for the elderly, one for males, one females, one for children and one for tuberculosis patients.) They are overcrowded and trying to get them to accept new applicants is almost impossible due to the incredible high demand and limited space and the arcane bureaucracy.

The Indian government states, based on UN statistics, that infant mortality rate is 56 per 1000 live births (this is not an estimation of stillborns, which is extremely high) and maternal mortality rate is 540 per 100.000 live births a year. The same UN statistics for the United States shows the rate of infant mortality is 6 per 1000 and 17 per 100,000 for maternal mortality.

One of the major horrors that almost nobody likes to talk about or face is the trafficking of children for prostitution, the sexual abuse and children living in orphanages in deplorable conditions. Another horror we have witnessed are babies in orphanages who had severe respiratory distress, many critically malnourished and dehydrated, and some with scabies so bad that they appeared to have chicken pox.

These conditions exists all over India, but the most shocking conditions exist in major metropolises like Delhi, Bangalore, and Mumbai. This is probably because many people already living on the margins of society are moving from remote villages in the countryside to cities where they hope to find possibilities of survival.


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© 2007 by Lean Frog