Delhi street kids bank on each other
Like most bankers his age, Anuj Chaudhry has a lot to think about each day. Balancing the books. Checking on delinquent loans. Finishing his homework.
Well, okay, so the world doesn't have a lot of 13-year-old bankers. The number of orphaned, street-dwelling, rag-picking youths who run cooperative banks for homeless children must be even smaller.
But Anuj and the 160 members of the Bal Vikas Bank, or Child Development Bank, say children who live on the street should have more opportunities to take charge of their finances and help each other escape the cycle of poverty. If they wait for adults to provide for them, they say, they'll wait forever.
"They are saving their money and proving their worth," says the gangly Anuj in the bank's headquarters, a five-by-seven-foot wood-and-metal cubicle in a corner of the Fatehpuri Night Shelter in Old Delhi. "Now they have hope for the future."
The concept behind Anuj's bank - giving small loans for small projects - is not new. But while activists and development experts are quick to offer small loans to poor women in Bangladesh to start their own businesses, for instance, or to homeless adults in London or New York to learn new job skills, lenders are more skeptical when it comes to giving money to indigent kids. Will they spend it on drugs? Will they just take it and run?
"The general view of working with children is that we can only see them as being protected from the world, within the four walls of a home," says Rita Panicker, director of Butterflies, a non-profit group that helped set up the Bal Vikas Bank. "But people forget that the children we're working with are very empowered. They're masters of their own destiny, if only in their minds."
Yet the debate over microcredit, as the concept is called, goes deeper than that. On one side are critics who argue that microcredit is just as its name implies: a positive force on a miniscule scale, certainly no substitute for a large, coordinated poverty-alleviation effort. On the other side are supporters who say the poor cannot wait for the better-off - or the government - to lend a hand. They must help themselves.
Past efforts to move children off the street have failed, Ms. Panicker says, because they have not taken into account how children grow up on the streets, making up their own rules.
"Teamwork? Oh my God," she laughs. "Each one of these children is a leader, a hero. They hate to be followers," she says. "So if you train them to be factory workers under a superior, they'll say: 'Who does he think he is?' "
In a curious way, Panicker says, street children make ideal entrepreneurs - wily, adventurous, and driven to try new ideas.
But with so little to invest, street-working children can also be incredibly conservative with their own money. Panicker recalls when the children first discussed the rules of their bank at their weekly children's counsel. At the start, they created so many rules - no smokers, drinkers, drug-takers, drug-peddlers, bullies, pickpockets, or gamblers - that they soon realized none of them would qualify for a loan. They eventually loosened the rules, and so far the children's bank has helped four teenagers start their own businesses, selling goods from pushcarts at the roadside.
While most observers applaud Panicker and other nongovernmental groups for their work, many say that such small-scale efforts will make only a marginal difference in the lives of India's teeming millions of homeless.
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