Jyoti Kumari’s story, from street urchin to child journalist in Delhi

Since 2002, the CHETNA Association, which works in favour of homeless children, has published Balaknama, a paper by and for kids. A quarterly in the beginning, it now prints 10,000 copies a month with stories about everyday lives and abuses. Street kids are themselves the reporters. Through this tool, the NGO wants to offer them a better future.

New Delhi (AsiaNews) – Balaknama, Voice of Children in Hindi, is a paper by and for New Delhi’s street and working children, covering a range of issues, from child marriage and child abuse to alcoholism and police brutality.

Jyoti Kumari is one of its 70 kid reporters. The 16-year-old girl once led a life of hopeless poverty; now she is one of the tabloid’s “senior” staff. She recently told her story, and that of the paper, to Agence France Presse.

The newspaper, which started in 2002 as an eight-page quarterly, has slowly increased its circulation to about 10,000 copies and is now published monthly. The greatest challenge is to raise money to help kids realise their dreams and improve their living conditions.

Growing up with an alcoholic and sick father, Kumari and her five siblings spent long hours picking through rubbish to find recyclables, and sometimes begging, to scrape together enough money for food.

Her breakthrough came in 2010, when a chance visit by a voluntary teacher from a non-profit organisation, the Childhood Enhancement through Training and Action (CHETNA), to her family’s shack allowed her to enrol in a distance-learning programme.

“I was very impressed when she [the teacher] told me the value of education and the opportunities for even desperately poor children like me,” said Kumari who spends her nights at a homeless shelter.

Within weeks, she began heading out on reporting assignments and conducting interviews, in between her new schooling.

Today she is an active newspaper reporter, writing about homeless people living in the streets and under flyovers.

She hopes the paper and its stories can make a difference for others, “Like when the drunkard neighbourhood uncle mended his ways once his misbehaviour with his wife and children made it to the paper,” said Kumari, giggling as she recalled the case.

One of the paper’s biggest stories exposed police officers who used street children to carry bodies from railways tracks after a deadly accident or a suicide. This forced the authorities to halt the practice.

For CHETNA director Sanjay Gupta, “people need to understand that our paper is a very serious attempt by these children to get themselves heard. This is really a perfect tool for their empowerment.”

Although the paper’s circulation has increased, it is constantly short of funds. “We are selling the newspapers for two rupees [less than a cent] as of now. Still not many people are buying it,” Gupta said. “It is about mind-sets”.

Balaknama readers are mostly homeless children and their parents, and since most of them cannot read or write, reporters like Kumari read out the news to them.

Lastly, a wiser Kumari knows “that none of the big newspapers will bother to write about issues that matter to us”; nevertheless, “Just to be able to have an opportunity to express ourselves is a huge thing for us.”