KEY POINTS:
Anurag, 11, never went to school because he had to scavenge through Delhi's bins, dumps and gutters in search of sellable trash each day before spending his nights sleeping on the street.
Now, thanks to India's biggest effort yet to educate every last child, he has a smart
blue uniform and has started going to a mainstream state school in the Indian capital - something he had once considered a luxury for destitute children like himself.
He is happy and smiling, has a bed in a residential centre and is thinking about becoming a driver when he grows up.
"I never had a home, so it's not like I've left home," he said, holding hands with his new friend, 10-year-old Rahul.
"I ran away from home because they wouldn't send me to school," adds Rahul, explaining that his parents sent him to work at a motorcycle repair shop on Delhi's outskirts.
Anurag and Rahul are among 30 homeless children involved in a pilot project in Delhi, giving them housing and "bridging" classes to help them catch up on lost years of schooling.
It is part of India's renewed commitment to educate all of its children, including the country's millions of child labourers and beggars, as it struggles to meet the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals.
"Besides locking them up, the Government never really had a programme for street kids," said Harsh Mander, a children's rights activist who set up the first home on behalf of the Government.
"It was suggested they don't have mainstream rights."
Charities have done similar work for decades, but Mander says this is the Government's first attempt on a national scale to bring such marginalised children into education.
Although Mander thinks Delhi has made a promising start, he says the city state would need to build several hundred similar small residential centres to house its tens of thousands of homeless and working children.
Education officials agree this will not happen soon.
Of those children it can take on, Delhi hopes to get at least half into mainstream schools. The others may have insurmountable learning difficulties, often because of prolonged malnourishment or an unstable childhood. They were reached too late.
When India launched a new campaign for universal education called Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan in 2001, at least 32 million children were still not going to school, according to education authorities. They say it's now down to seven million.
So for now, Anurag and his friends are the lucky ones.
- Reuters
