Walking around the same areas at night, still the ground was littered with people. Littered is probably an appropriate word. Thousands of adults and children wander the streets by day, and curl up on the pavements by night, saris pulled over their heads for some privacy. Sometimes the lines of still bodies covered head to toe in cloth look like lines of corpses in the aftermath of a disaster.
During the day the children can be found sorting through rubbish to sell onto recyclers, working in tea shops, begging, performing to drivers at traffic lights with painted faces and makeshift musical instruments. As you walk through the markets and slum areas in the pitch black of night you can make out children taking heroin to escape the reality of their lives. Much more goes on out of sight. Sexual abuse and exploitation is prevalent. It's hard to get definitive data on the scale of the problem as children come and go, but there are an estimated 45,000 children living alone in the streets in Delhi alone. Hundreds of thousands more live with their families on the streets or in the slums.
These adults and children are treated like the litter of the economic powerhouse of modern day India, discarded and largely overlooked by a growing Indian middle and upper class that has the disposable income to make it difference. According to a recent study of Child Abuse in India (http://wcd.nic.in/childabuse.pdf), although children are 40% of the population, only 4.91% of the total government expenditure is spent on children's health, education, development and protection. Only 0.034% is spent on child protection.
Adjusting to working in this middle income context has been the shock. In many of the developing countries I've worked there are some strong characteristics. Half of the government's budget is aid. The largest employer, after the government, is the NGO sector. The most sought after job is an NGO job. Civil society is often relatively new. Modern India is not dependent on aid. The government calls the shots, not the donors. Large bi-lateral, government to government, donors are thinking about phasing out their support. The new generation are looking to the private sector for a career and financial security. The NGO sector is full of local organisations that are enormous institutions with long and rich histories. They are strong and assertive and look to the north predominantly for funding rather than a package of capacity building and funding. It's a new context that forces you to think hard about power, influence, partnership and your role.
A lot of positive things stuck in my mind aside from the thousands of people living on the streets of Delhi. The streets full of 1950s white and yellow Ambassador taxis; the historical buildings at every turn; the expansive and beautiful parks; the clean air the government have achieved by forcing all buses and taxis to switch from petrol and diesel to gas; the literally continuous stream of newspaper reports of crazy bus drivers running down scores of people; the snake charmer in the market; the elephant I met at a crossroads in the middle of the night when I first arrived in Delhi.
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