Meera Mahadevan

F a c e t o f a c e w i t h p o v e r t y : t h e M o b i l e C r e c h e s in India I

Poverty is a vicious circle. Beginning with the child, not only is he affected but also his parents, the family and community and it is reflected in the state of society as a whole. With limited resources in hand, Mobile Cr6ches went forward to tackle this problem by taking the child on the construction site as its priority. By child, I mean a baby of the 0- 3 age group. This is the most vulnerable group. For cen- turies this child has lain by the roadside while his parents have helped to build magnificent cities. When you pass by a bundle of rags you do not realize that there is a baby inside until you hear it cry. This is a state of affairs not only in Delhi but all over India. Not only do the construction labourers leave their babies on the roadside but for that matter every poor mother who is compelled to work has to leave her young to fend for themselves. The older chil- dren are left in charge of the babies and the household. A girl of 6, for example, who needs attention herself is forced into a position where she brings up her baby brothers and sisters.

Our focus is, and always has been, the little one. Even today the children under 3 form our most cherished age group, and around them we have drawn up a large circle of activities and services without which our aims cannot be achieved. The first lesson we learned in our experiment was that the child cannot be iso- lated either from the family or from the community. He is very much a part and parcel

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of his family and community. On this under- standing the services in Mobile Creches evolved and developed.

We started the programme with a creche, as that was our priority as we saw it. The moment we took in the baby, the older children who were looking after them had nothingto do and they also came into the centre. Most of them had never been to school because of their nomadic way of life and because they were looking after their siblings. Today, instead of having only a creche, our programme consists of a creche, school centre covering the entire gamut of o - I2 years. There are now three sections: a creche for the 0-3 group; nursery classes for the 3-6 group; and elementary classes for the 6-x2 group. But this was not all: as we gained experience, we found a great need for contact with parents. Although the mothers were constantly visiting the creches and were in touch with our staff we felt the need for more time with them. I t was on this basis that we launched our adult-education programme. Since both parents work, all our adult-education classes are held in the evening. We have realized how impossible it will be to cater only to this

I. This article is an edited version of a paper written for Unicef and currently being published in the fourth issue of I977 of Assignment Children by the late Mrs Mahadevan, founder of Mobile Cr6ches. I t is being used by Prospects with the kind permission of Unicef and of Mobile Cr6ches.

Prospects, Vol. VI I , No. 4, I977

Face to face with poverty: the Mobile Creches in India

or that age group, and have taken the whole community as our target.

Mobile Cr6ches specializes in working with the poorest sections of our society. The un- skilled labourers, the rag-pickers, coal pickers and others like them are our clients. We have decided to concentrate on this group, as very few agencies work with them and they form the bulk of our population. From its inception we have realized that the best way to get closer to the community was to keep our centres as close to their homes as possible. In India, there is a tradition of beautifying simple huts by plastering them with mud and cow dung and decorating them with various indigenous ma- terials. We adopted this method and kept our centres cheap, simple but beautiful. The equip- ment was also simple and familiar to the mothers. For example, the cradle that we use in our cr6ches is typically Indian and versatile. Throughout rural India this kind of cradle is used and it costs next to nothing. The cloth hammock in which the baby sleeps is easy to wash. In case of a sudden rise in the number of babies to be accommodated additional ham- mocks can be tied between two cradles. The staggering munber of children that India has to cater for, calls for a cheaper and local model. Anything sophisticated will not only defeat our purpose but it will also be a useless exercise since it would not be possible to copy this model on a large scale throughout the country.

India is developing fast in every field. The country is mobilizing every resource to accel- erate its transformation from the bullock cart age to the space age, but when are we going to find a solution for millions of our people who live in dire poverty? The vast potentiality of our human resources still lie untapped. The majority of our children are stunted physically and mentally because basic opportunities are denied to them. Only when this situation can be rectified can our country truly progress.

At this point a short description of the Mobile Creches services would not be out of place.

Creches have basic equipment like cradles, mats, a cr6che table to change babies' clothes, to keep medicines, etc., plates, glasses, spoons and linen. The accommodation allotted to us is usually drab. I t may be housed in a basement or on the eighteenth floor of an unfinished skyscraper. With the work going on in fuU swing all around us and dust floating, we do our best to keep the place pleasant. To mellow down the harsh surroundings, the staff decorates the place with the children's colourful drawings. The cradles and cots of the babies have lovely mobiles hanging on them and there are many things around which could be called toys in conventional language. An average budget of IO rupees is enough to replenish our supply of toys for a section of say fifty children.

The babies who come to us from the age of 3-4 weeks and are generally malnourished receive an initial medical examination and are prescribed a diet by the visiting doctor. Most of the babies get milk, vitamin drops and other high-protein food according to need. Although the doctor visits a centre only once a week, the supervisors and nutritionists keep a close watch on the children's progress,

Since the child receives very little attention from the mother we try to make our creches a home from home. Every effort is made to develop the child physically as well as emotion- aUy, intellectually and socially. The creches resound with the traditional songs familiar to the children. A conscious effort is made to converse with the babies in order to develop their vocabulary. Working in unhygienic sur- roundings without sanitation, Mobile Creches has a gigantic task to maintain hygienic stan- dards in its centres. We had to improvise little places which babies could use as toilets and then find methods of disposing the waste in a hygi- enic way. Almost everything that is undertaken in the creche programme for the children is something that can be practised at home.

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Nursery school

Nursery schools are considered a luxury in any poor country mainly because a conventional nursery school has elaborate equipment which is costly and out of reach for any group with limited resources. In India, even today, we have thousands of nursery schools aided by welfare departments running on most unimaginative lines for lack of equipment. Time and again people have raised doubts if such a nursery school helps a child at all or whether the child would learn more from nature if left to itself. With these hazards in our minds we skirted the pitfalls and used our imagination to have some of the cheapest indigenous material and methods to provide necessary stimulation to the child in the age group of 3-6 years. In the nursery section the material that you find is cardboard, chart paper, glazed paper, kite paper, wooden beads, scissors, blackboard, stones, leaves, flowers, potters clay to replace plastescine, rag dolls, old saris, wooden blocks and several such local items which cost next to nothing.

All the local customs and festivals are used for story-telling and dramatizing folk songs are worked into nursery rhymes. The result is that the teacher learns to go from one experiment to another because of the cultural familiarity of the methods and is always surrounded by a group of happy children. There is nothing foreign in our nursery section for either the child or the teacher. Every scientific method is translated into Indian experience.

Elementary school

Once you have accepted the fact that with or with- out resources every child has a right to a happy childhood, you come to the question of how to provide it. Having found our answer to the problems of o-6 years we realized how imposs- ible it would be not to cater to the 6-12 age group which is equally deprived of oppor-

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tunities. In the absence of creches older children usually look after the babies and also attend to household chores. This naturally rules out any schooling for them. But even if their parents decide to educate their children there are too many difficulties which need handling. Let me explain.

In Delhi, primary education is free and children from the lower socio-economic level are entitled to get free books and uniforms. Unfortunately, the poorest sections of our so- ciety who are completely iUiterate and out of touch with the civic urban life are not even aware of these opportunities. Thus, in spite of best intentions, the government fails to reach the poorest population in the country. This is where the role of an agency like Mobile Creches becomes very vital. When we take care of the babies and the nursery-age children, we prepare the older children in our elementary sections to join the local elementary school. From the beginning Mobile Crtches decided not to run paraUel elementary schools but only help the children to enter them and continue.

The child needs some basic knowledge of numbers and alphabets to join in classes given by Mobile Crtches; we send hundreds of chil- dren to the local elementary schools. For the children in the 8-12 age group an intensive education programme is provided so that they are admitted in suitable classes according to their age. It will not be out of place to mention here that the children are most eager to learn and they are marvellous students. They make our task much more enjoyable by remaining at the top of their classes in the elementary schools.

We faced some opposition from parents who were reluctant to send their children to the municipal elementary schools. But by coaxing a little we found a few parents to start with who were willing to send their boys. The girls were still a problem and continue to be so. When the first such batch prepared by us was sent to the elementary school we invited the parents to

Face to face with poverty: the Mobile Creches in India

bring curds (yoghurt) and feed their children on that day at the centre, to wish them good luck in a traditional way. I t was a touching sight to see the proud parents beaming at their children. Once the barriers were broken and a few children started going to the elementary schools, the fear subsided and now it is part of our programme to prepare children to join the elementary local schools, twice a year.

Our other problem in India is that of school drop-outs. About 8o per cent of the children who join elementary schools drop out for various reasons, the most important being poverty. We find that the child with illiterate parents and a bare atmosphere at home lags behind in his studies. Mobile Creches decided to continue special coaching to elementary schoolchildren. Every year we organize schools during summer vacation in order to help the child keep up with the rest of the class. Several methods are used in order to fill in the gap in the knowledge of the child due to poverty. Visits to historical places, museums, post offices, railway stations, etc., are included in the curriculum.

We also had to contend with the elementary schoolteacher's prejudice which hampered our child's progress. This teacher had her pre- conceived notion that a slum child was dirty, used bad language and would steal things from the school. They failed to see the child's eager- ness to be part and parcel of the school. Mobile Creches worked on this front as well. We had invited the local teachers several times to come and be our guests so that they would see the methods we used in our elementary sections.

I t was not enough for us to accept these children as our priority and work out methods to help them, but we had many battles to fight to achieve our goal. The most difficult battle was that of attitudes. To our great dismay we found that our children were always an outside entity. They did not form part of our society according to most of us. The stamp of a 'these children' was too glaring for us to ignore.

Let me give a few examples. When we started working on the sites we had to depend on the contractors to give us accommodation for our centres. We were invariably given places without doors, windows or floors. I t may be a bit ridiculous but it is true that an engineer on the building site could not conceive that 'these children' needed a proper room to be accommodated. Thus we had to change our definition of accommodation to the structures as--a lockable room, a washable floor and non- leaking roof. To this day Mobile Creches is fighting this battle and at times we start a centre in a doorless room and persuade the contractor to put a door in for us.

Contractors who are obliged to give a water facility to the labour on the work-site by law never fulfil the condition. Since we could never operate the creches without water we make it a big issue and somehow convinced the contrac- tors to provide us with the water facility. Here again we felt that they were a little more wilting to give water facilities for the creche rather than to their labour. Mobile Creches, of course, never kept the water tap inside the centre but insisted on a common bathroom. There are a number of examples like this which can be quoted.

We had to educate our own staff. The train- ing starts for everyone in a way that helps them to change their attitude. We addressed the child endearingly and respectfully so that the creche workers could follow our example. The first lesson for every worker was to treat the child as her equal. For example, early morning cleaning is normally done by the children and teachers together. The training also gives the worker an idea as to how to identify our clients. For example, in the slums of Delhi we have mixed populations. The families which are a little well-to-do easily befriend the teachers and their children come to the school cleaned up. This becomes a great temptation for the teacher to neglect the poorer child whose mother may not bring him to the centre. Although we do

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not reject the child who comes to the centre cleaned up, constant surveys are made to check i f we are not neglecting our real client.

The other group whose wrong attitudes bothers us much more is the professional group in our country. Unfortunately, the unimagin- ative professional tries to fit in everything in the definition they have learned in the textbooks. When a person has higher degrees in social work and relevant subjects, she or he often becomes completely remote from field activities. I f we are to evolve our theories out of practical work, a lot of experimental work will have to be undertaken in the field with the people in order to arrive at solutions to our problems. Unfor- tunately, the rigours of field work are so great that our professional friends may not be able to stand it. Normally non-professionals like myself undertake experiments like Mobile Cr6ches while our professionals are hunting for solutions outside the country. There has to be a meeting point as it is a great loss to both professionals and non-professionals.

Training

The creche worker is the main pivot around whom the programme blossoms. She is the heart and soul of the project. She is the insti- tution and therefore she has to be one who shares all the aspirations of the institution.

Where does one get a person of that calibre, who will share the aspirations and ideology of an institution? Basically, all the workers Mobile Cr6ches employs come to us out of their econ- omic need. They belong to the lower-middle classes and are educated through the Hindi medium. Many of them are members of large families and have had no opportunity for higher education.

Belonging to the lower-middle classes and traditionally brought up, the girls are hard working and lively. Since most of the girls are between 18 and ~5, they are optimistic, ready

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to laugh and sing with the children who wear torn clothes. In the last seven years, we have consistently watched a pattern that has emerged in our recruiting system. I f the girl can survive the first one or two days with us, she can be one of our staff. There is a large number of needy applicants who on first visit decide they cannot work in our centres. Many of them have left us feeling a little sorry for us. For the first two or three weeks, a new applicant is allowed to work under experienced teachers and absorb the situation. Unless the trainee volunteers to do all the work in a centre, she is not taken on for training.

Mobile Crbches has now evolved its own training programme. In early years, we tried to take girls trained by other institutions but they could not stand the rigour of work that Mobile Cr6ches has before it. The unfortunate part of any training we found was that a teacher will only teach and a nurse will only bandage. Mobile Creches needed teachers who will first attend to a child's sores, bath and earache before settling in a classroom. We also needed teachers who will convince the parents to send their children to the school. Thus, the duties of a worker in Mobile Cr6ches were many-sided. She has to be a social worker, a teacher and a mother to the child.

On the face of it, it sounds too idealistic and rather an impossible proposition. Even we can- not claim to have found an answer to all the training problems. But we have with us today a large group of people who are not just the paid employees of Mobile Cr6ches, but much more than that-- they are, as mentioned earlier, the main pivot of the programme.

We took our lesson in our training from some of the senior conventional social work organiz- ations. The usual pattern is that the field-level worker and the policy-makers are so remote from each other that both parties are not aware of each other's difficulties. Not only is the field worker in any welfare work, be it government or voluntary agency, the lowest paid person,

Face to face with poverty: the Mobile Creches in India

but she has no status or voice in the policies of the project.

Mobile Cr6ches tried to avoid this pitfall by drastically changing our constitution, making it compulsory to have only active workers from the field, administration and fund-raisers to form the governing body. This also helped us to keep the so-called 61ite committee ladies away from our governing body.

Mobile Cr&hes set before it a training which gave its staff not only the skills to operate a cr6che, nursery and elementary classes, but also a rigid training in decision-making and dealing independently with local problems. The first part of the training is easier than the later part and it also takes a longer time for any trainee to mature to this role. But it certainly is not an impossible task.

Most of our training takes place in the field with some classroom lectures. After the initial screening of the candidate in the field under a senior worker, she starts attending weekly work- shops at our training centre. Every candidate goes through the training for all these sections, namely creche, nursery and elementary. In India, there is no cr6che training as such and Mobile Creches had to evolve its own syllabus. The emphasis in the cr6che training had to be very basic and simple. We had to spell out small details in dealing with cr6che babies.

A simple routine of baby's bath, feed and medication had to be standardized and equip- ment provided accordingly. The role of the dustbin had to be dramatized, disposal of dirty .cotton was formalized.

Whereas we could make our cr6che workers accept many new standards in this training there are always small problems that keep cropping up all the time. For instance, having separate towels for each child is one long battle one has to fight with our cr&he helpers. When we found that the toys for the little ones are brought out only when all babies are bathed and ready, we changed the arrangement of creche furniture in such a way that the child

could go and get a toy early for himself. We also made life easy for the staffby making

a comfortable kitchen with a gas burner and proper storage bins.

But the most important thing that we achieved was to produce model nursery equipment suit- able to a country like India that has to think of children in millions. With little variations, the same model can be copied in rural nurseries.

The greatest disadvantage of this socio- economic level is parents' inability to help their child, but with our grooming in the nursery class the disadvantages of a bare home back- ground can be taken care of to some extent. Although our children come from economically deprived backgrounds, they have an abundance of parental security and love. These children, given an opportunity, learn very fast; and that, perhaps, is our main strength.

Once a cr6che worker has gone through the formal training in all the aspects of work at a Mobile Creche centre, she then is given further orientation in nutrition, community work and medical social work. The candidates selected for such further training are usually the ones who have shown initiative in their work. At a senior level, most of the staff are encouraged to discuss their problems intelligently during their monthly meetings. Normally, when a particular problem is brought up by one director of a centre, it is put before all the directors to discuss. Out of these discussions we have made all our rules to be followed at the centres. I feel that this practice of group discussion has given our cr6che workers much more confidence and initiative that helps us to carry on our work efficiently.

Again, there are some local problems with which we have to live. We encourage our workers to find whatever solution they think is best for the centre. In one of the slums near a power station in Delhi, at least once a month due to a change of wind, the smoke would settle down on the whole slum, including our centre. The in-charge got into a habit of calling me up

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and asking for advice. I told her if she would like to close down for the day, she was free to do so. She knew I had no way of controlling this situation. But after putting down the phone she got a brilliant idea. They packed up their lunch and took all the four classes to the zoo which was only a I o-minute walk from the centre. The youngest were taken by the creche workers to the next centre which was near by. From that day on, the children always waited for the wind to change its direction so that they would have their classes in front of the duck pond in the zoo.

The moment you raise the status of the field worker, their involvement is increased. But we must also be prepared to let them make a few mistakes--and you cannot buy involvement. I t can only come from the ideology of the insti- tution of which she is a part.

Senior supervisors

Each capable worker is given training broadly in cr6che work, pre-school, elementary school and community work. During training, apti- tudes of each worker are observed and encour- aged in that direction. For example, a girl may be poor in a classroom with children but excellent with parents and vice-versa. Today, we have trouble-shooters in every field. Prob- lems in community, poor attendance, staff dif- f icult ies-you name i t - -and we have our ex- perts trained by us. Very often I feel that because they are unaware of the wonders they are doing as social workers, they are unassum- ing. The turnover, surprisingly, is quite low and the reason is that they are themselves involved in this work.

In a very old fashioned way, we are highly disciplined in our duties. Most of the staff argues out their point of view. They are allowed to make a few mistakes and learn very fast. We put too much responsibility on each worker and as a result many of them have dealt with

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their own problems successfully with only a little guidance from us. Workshops, although we call them workshops, are much more than that. They are sessions for planning, for evalu- ating and also at times periods of introspection. We have several categories of staff. Higher sec- ondary school girls who form a bulk of our staff are the teachers, cr6che worker and community workers. We have also started recruiting boys for the past 3-4 years to work in creches. They bring a different atmosphere with them and children love to have a male teacher around.

Community's role

From the beginning, Mobile Creches had whole- hearted support from the children on construc- tion sites as well as slums. Mobile Cr6ches workers became part of aU the big construction sites. Seeing their children so happy with our staff, parents also accepted us, although they were a little suspicious at the beginning. But from the beginning we were very conscious that our role was to give the community equal treat- ment. We wanted to keep away from a chari- table approach. This was not easy to achieve as the community had nothing to give us for the services.

To begin with, we identified a few families as our contact point and asked them to do small chores for the centre. In a place where water was difficult to obtain, each family would help the staff to get enough water for the day. Each child was charged a nominal fee. They all had to buy slates, notebooks, pencils, erasers and any other item needed by him at sub- sidized rates. Each time children were taken out on local trips, parents were asked to give bus fares and some snacks. Here again let me explain that it took a lot of convincing for parents to agree to buy a slate or a notebook for their child. Again, there are always a few families who decide to remain unconvinced for a long time.

In the creches, many babies are given half

Face to face with poverty: the Mobile Cr~.ches in India

an egg as a special diet. Once the child shows progress, mothers come forward to share the cost of an egg. There are some slums where many mothers give us small donations on cer- tain festivals which we accept. This gives them a sense of prestige.

When the idea of charging fees was intro- duced, many mothers refused to pay for the nur- sery children as there was nothing but playing and singing in this age group. I t was quite understandable and we decided to get a mothers' meeting organized to explain all our nursery activities with the children. This meeting was a great success and we now always hold this type of meeting when a new centre is opened.

During the winter, Delhi is very cold and most of our children have inadequate clothing. We had a problem before us and did not know how to solve it. Woollen clothes were too ex- pensive, but we did not want to distribute clothes. We decided to let the children come dressed in their own way but to have a charcoal stove as they have in their own houses. This again was a point on which we received a lot o f co-operation from parents. They took turns in providing the charcoal stoves. During the winter months, most of us are wearing woollen clothes but some of the workers, we noticed, would remove their cardigans while they were with the children. I t was a beautiful sentiment but we never discussed it.

Today, our main point of contact with the parents is through our Adult Education Pro- gramme. In fact, we took up adult education programmes to strengthen our services to the children. I t has helped us a great deal in bring- ing efficiency in our services to children. Before undertaking immunization, BCG vaccination or oral polio vaccine, parents' meetings are held with the help of film shows, flash cards and other methods. This way we do not lose their goodwiU nor does it look like a high-handed programme imposed on them. This may be a slow process, but as education of the entire community we find it is the best method.

Mothers" meetings

Although mothers' meetings are a very common feature in Mobile Cr6ches activities today it had an interesting beginning. In I969/70 , when we were new in the field, we tried to get the mothers together but they were always busy in their household chores. They avoided coming to the centre and many of them preferred to watch from a distance. Then we tried cooking demonstrations and the group got together. Within a few months, they took part in dis- cussions and made fun of the creche workers who were younger than them and soon their shyness and suspicions vanished. They looked forward to the monthly get-togethers. So much so that the mothers would not allow our workers to bring the ingredients for cooking demon- strations. They also helped to get the utensils and the ingredients from their own homes. From nutrition education, we went to other topics in child care, health hygiene, weaning foods, diet of the pregnant and lactating mother, etc.

The malnourished child was our main worry in our cr6ches and we decided to pay more attention to the diet of pregnant mothers. Here again, we had to fight their age-old prejudice against powdered milk. Whenever a mother had a healthy baby of 6- 7 pounds after taking iron, folic acid and milk diet at our centre, the Mobile Creches workers had the child's naming ceremony done at the centre with all the tra- ditional pomp of singing and dancing. This advertised the story to the other mothers and we gained one more step towards our goal of mothers' education.

We tried the same tactics in introducing solids at an early age to babies. In India, in many states, there is a small ceremony when the child is given his first solid diet. Leaving out the religious parts, we just had a special diet cooked for the whole centre, like rice cooked in milk and introduced the babies to solids. The mothers were always present and thrilled at the fuss we were making over their babies.

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We also included in our education programme political topics like mock elections, inviting im- portant guests, etc. Many labourers from other states who lived without their families in Delhi took keen interest in our cooking demonstrations and were always ready to ask intelligent ques- tions as they cooked their own meals.

Although literacy did not draw enough crowds at our adult literacy centres, our general meet- ings are more popular. Drama groups per- forming Ram Leela is the most popular enter- tainment. From the religious themes, we bring our adult to social and political themes. Here again, the slum population advances faster than our migrant labour. I can go on giving so many examples of how we tried to solve our problems of getting closer to the community. Community involvement is perhaps the most discussed jar- gon in social work. We took the simple Indian tradition of hospitality and got the involvement of the community. We went to their slums and worker camps but we went as their guests. In the worker camps we went with the blessings of the contractor and the Works Ministry as well, but in the slums we insisted on being invited. This at once made them feel important and responsible for our crrche workers. Be- cause of their poverty, they do not offer their hospitality unless they are sure we will welcome it. We banked on this simple thing and got their full co-operation.

Lok-Doot

Lok-Doot, the cultural troupe of Mobile Cr6ches, was launched this year to motivate and educate people in various aspects of our literacy programme. Most of the artists are the talented staff of Mobile Cr6ches. Apart from staging entertaining programmes, Lok- Doot produces skits and smaU plays empha- sizing the importance of education and its use in day-to-day life. It has met with tremendous success in getting the message to the people

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through songs and dramas. From time to time, Lok-Doot also produces children's plays based on stories from Punch Tantra and Hitopadesh. The skits for literacy are taken from some of the incidents that happen on the work-sites. The artists use the language spoken by the site workers and thus endear themselves to the audience. We get the local leaders to invite the troupe and most of the arrangements of organizing are left to the community leaders.

Thus taking the child as our mid-point, our compass has gone in a circle to cover the child's family and the whole community. This circle would have remained incomplete if we had failed to carry with us the authorities concerned.

For instance, contractors are required by law to provide crrches on work-sites if they employ more than twenty women. Neither the contrac- tors nor the contracting parties (government or non-government) ever paid any attention to this welfare clause of crrches in our contract conditions. The bureaucrats were quite satisfied that there are beautiful welfare sites for children of construction workers in the country. When we appeared on the scene, this law was a dead letter. None of the officers in the Public Works Department or the Labour Ministry were fully aware of the law or its implications. We took up the matter at the ministerial level and wrote letters to ministers concerned, including the Prime Minister of India. Our dialogue with the government continued for three or four years and, in the end, we received an assurance that in future all government contracts would be made known to Mobile Crrches. The govern- ment could not help us more than this. This did not make our task any more easier for our meetings with the government officials which had annoyed some of the contractors to some extent. But we continued to work consistently on building sites trying to make crrches a reg- ular feature at least in Delhi and Bombay.

In the early years of its expansion, contractors supported Mobile Creches with accommo-

Face to face with poverty: the Mobile Cr6ches in India

dation, water facilities and monthly contri- butions. Our problems with contractors started after a few years of our work with the migrant labour. The crrches had made life much easier for the mothers, and the community benefited on the whole from our services. A time came when the labour started looking for a Mobile Crrches centre at every work-site. This was a turning point when the contractors blamed us for spoiling their labour. Although we tried to point out that the mothers would be much more efficient if there was a crrche on the work-site, the contractors were always doubt- ful. We tried not to precipitate matters. We made friends with contractors and tried to be- friend government officials in order to be able to set up as many crrches as possible on the big building projects. Today, we are definitely a familiar but a little troublesome group on the work-sites and many contractors comply with our requests only to get us out of the way. Among the government officials, there are friends who inform us unofficially about forth- coming big contracts. In the fifth plan, the Government of India gave a priority to crrche programmes and Mobile Creches now receives a substantial grant from the Welfare Depart- ment. This has enabled us to work at cer- tain sites even if the contractors refuse to contribute financially. Our aim is to educate the community through our work. We want the contractors and the authorities concerned to be convinced that there is no ulterior motive, and our focus is the child.

Throughout this article, it may sound as if Mobile Crrches had nothing but success in its work. I t has been, however, an uphill task to build up this chain of day-care centres for the poorest urban child. At every place we worked, half the things there were beyond our control.

We failed miserably to bring a healthy environ- ment in the worker camps as well as in the slums. The authorities had to be reminded all the time about their own duties. Sanitation is still our problem in most of the areas.

We are also aware that the economic level of each family matters a lot and yet we were not effective as far as helping them improve in that direction. We have worked so hard to change the attitude of our people towards chil- dren and yet I do not think we have convinced them. I t is always charity that is lurking behind every individual donation, and we are termed as Mahathmas (great soul). No one looks upon this work as part of India's development. Fi- nally, there is a preconceived idea that welfare work is women's job.

In training, also, there are plenty of frus- trations. To prepare a good, solid creche worker, it takes a great deal of effort. I f Mobile Creches would want to expand and multiply its ac- tivities, it will be difficult mainly because of a lack of workers.

I have tried to make a point that you need very little by way of finance to make a happy centre. A country like India which is poor and lacks resources, cannot afford to sit back and do nothing. We have seen little girls improving in health only by washing their hair regularly. The joys of childhood are simple and should not be denied to any child. Every country will have to solve its own problem locally without importing sophisticated models from developed countries. Unless we decide to manage with little, we will not be able to bring every child the basic services it needs. Personally, I do not think money would be a problem. I f only we can create a cadre of workers who will accept this challenge we may be able to achieve the goal.

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