Street Children and the Big City

Karm Marg was born out of the need for a realistic support system for the street children living around the New Delhi Railway Station. There are about 300,000 such children who roam and work the streets of Delhi. They come from all over the country, mostly from rural India. Some run away from difficult and abusive circumstances at home while some others are drawn by the glitz of neon-lit big cities. There are still others who find themselves stranded and helpless on the mean city streets for no fault of their own.

Living under flyovers and above municipal bins, they live in the shadows of the big city. Survival is a daily struggle for them. More often than not, young girls arriving on their own at railway stations and bus terminals are picked up and forced into becoming sex workers. The boys start by finding petty work in exchange for food, working at the bottom of the station's jungle rule hierarchy formed by some corrupt policemen, porters, tea vendors, small-time drug peddlers and other assorted groups - all fixtures in such places. It is common knowledge that all young children living in/around the station are regularly sodomized, buying in return some sort of security, food or possibly just one more day's survival.

While Karm Marg has grown to accept any child in dire cicumstances living on the street or off it, the cause of street children still remains central to its ideology.