Little girl lost
By Rachna BISHT-RAWAT
I Try to be Pooja, for 11 hours, in just one day of her life. And fail miserably. Because, to be Pooja, you have to turn cartwheels, bare feet on a hot road, teeming with city cars and slick motorbikes.
You have to wriggle your body out of a tiny metal ring, walk on your hands, smile at strangers who are trying to ignore you, and then go around the vehicles, their engines still running, to get those coins that land with a delicious tinkle in your mother’s faded plastic bag.
You have to let your skirt drag on a dirty pavement, unmindful of which ‘sahab’ (big man) stepped there before you. You have to have the strength to support an entire family and the humility to pick a fly out of the seven rupee thali (plate of food) you buy from a roadside vendor, and eat the ‘sambhar’ (curry) it was floating on.
To be Pooja, you have to be working from 8am to 7pm everyday in India’s IT capital, Bangalore, where headhunters pursue professionals with breathtaking salaries, to get those Rs150 (about £2) that will look after the next day’s meal for the family, auto fare to the jhuggi (shanty) near the railway phatak (gate), and save enough to last through the year when you return to your village near Bilaspur, Madhya Pradesh, in an unreserved train compartment.
To be Pooja, you have to be an eight-year-old girl child, who never went to school, because she had to support her family; who goes to bed with her bones aching every night from the circus she performs every three minutes when the traffic lights change; and who will continue to do this for the next six years of her life. Till she is 14 and married off to a man who will look at her like a childbearing machine.
I see her at the traffic lights everyday. And never give her any money. It encourages begging, I’ve been led to believe.
Today, she is an assignment. And I wait patiently for the traffic lights to turn green so that the cars move on and she is free to pay attention to me. ‘Kitna mila?” (How much did you get?) I inquire. She shows me the three coins in her hand before putting them away.
I ask her if she’ll talk to me. She says no, she has work to do. A few sweets, a 10-rupee note and a smile, help me to change her mind,
“I like your nose pin”, I tell her. “Saga hui hai, tabse pehna hai,” (I’ve been wearing it since I was engaged), she says.
As we sit on the dirty pavement, my privileged status earning me place on a sheet of newspaper, the ice breaks and Pooja opens a small window into her life for me.
Though we’d like to look away, from her as well as the statistics, research shows that girl children in India live a life threatened by disregard, abuse, malnourishment, disease and death. Not all Indian children enjoy child rights equally. But what is worse is the wide gap that separates the girl child from the boy. Every day, girls who should be playing with dolls are forced to be prostitutes and unwilling mothers.
The abuse begins in the womb. Pooja was born into a family of performers — the Nats (jugglers) of Madhya Pradesh. “She couldn’t learn to walk on a rope”, her disgusted mother tells me. Hence she spends her childhood performing on the roadside. Before bringing her to Bangalore’s streets, her parents made sure she was engaged to a boy from the same community.
“We’ll marry her when she is 14,” her mother tells me. Girl children like Pooja do not have a choice. In life or in death. According to statistics from Human Rights Watch and Child Relief and You (CRY), an Indian child rights organization, between 1981 and 1991, 1.2 million female foetuses were aborted. In addition, an innumerable and unrecorded number of girl children are killed mercilessly within hours of being born.
Twenty-five per cent of girl children do not survive beyond their 15th birthday and a third of them actually die within the first year of their life. Every sixth female child death is due to gender discrimination.
And the reasons are many: traditional gender bias, poverty, sexual abuse, dowry and domestic violence. Fifteen per cent of India’s female prostitutes are believed to be children. Migration of people from the rural areas to the metros in search of a living has led to more prostitution and younger and younger girls being introduced to the trade. The average age fell from 14-16 years in the 1 980s to 10-14 years in the 1990s. Even more shameful is the fact that 80 per cent of child sex workers are found in the five metros — Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and Bangalore. And 40 per cent of them are below the age of 18.
It is a paradox within urban India as education levels have increased, there has been an increase in incest molestation on the streets, rapes and dowry deaths. While on one end of the spectrum we have the country leapfrogging into the new age, on the other end are these small children, who sell balloons in the biting cold evenings, barefooted and barely clothed, who stand with dirty dusters at traffic lights hoping to earn a few coins by cleaning cars. Some, even younger, lie in their young mothers’ laps (some mere children themselves) to help increase the sympathy factor while begging.
They never get immunization, don’t have access to clean food or medical care, spend nights on the roadside, are often hungry and always unprotected and ignored.
I can’t be Pooja, and neither can you. Nor can our daughters. And we’re grateful to this.
But why should even Pooja be Pooja? She has a right to childhood, if nothing else. The smile on her face should come from reasons other than an extra collects.
Unfortunately, in India, we often teach a girl child to judge herself only by social status and the opinions of dominant male members around her. We still groom her to grow up and provide comfort to the male members of society, to play the reproductive machine and continue the race.
Pooja’s childhood should have been preserved. Because she has the right — to survive, develop, be protected and participate in the decisions, that affect her life. She and the thousands like her, impact on future generations. Our inability to protect her is a failure of society, the government and all of us so proud of our heritage and the progress the country is making.

Culled fromCPQ magazine