3 min readNew DelhiFeb 23, 2022 06:29 AM IST
First published on: Feb 23, 2022 at 02:43 AM IST
The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) informed the Supreme Court that there are 17,914 street children, or “children in street situations’’ across the country. The Commission also said that Maharashtra has the highest number of children living on the streets.
According to the affidavit filed by the Commission on Monday in the apex court, there are 17,914 living on the streets, out of which 9,530 children live on the streets with their families, 834 children live on the streets alone, and 7,550 children live on streets during the day but go back to families living in slums during the night. Amongst them, 10,359 children are boys and 7,554 are girls.
The NCPCR has filed its compliance affidavit in response to a Supreme Court order on January 17th in a suo moto writ petition on children living in street conditions.
This latest data compiled by states till February 15th and uploaded on “Bal Swaraj’’ – a portal created by the Commission, excludes the 2 lakh children that had been identified by Save the Children on behalf of NCPCR in an earlier exercise, it said.
An age wise disaggregation has found that the largest group of children living on the streets of 7,522 children are between ages 8-13 years followed by 3,954 kids between ages 4-7 years.
The data further reveals that Maharashtra has the largest number of street children at 4,952 followed by Gujarat (1,990), Tamil Nadu (1,703), Delhi (1,653) and Madhya Pradesh (1,492). But Uttar Pradesh has the highest number of children living alone on the streets at 270.
The Commission has said that street children are most commonly found in religious places, traffic signals, industrial areas, railway stations, bus stations and tourist places.
The NCPCR has also identified 51 religious places in 17 states where child beggars, child labour as well as child abuse are “more prevalent’’. The Commission has already initiated an audit of these places by a third party and studies of 27 religious places have already been completed.
While there are a large number of children in different age groups living on streets, this number drops between the age groups of 14-18 years. The Commission has said that this drop in numbers needs to be investigated in order to ascertain whether these children were being trafficked into illegal trades.
The Commission has further said that the Child and Adolescent Labour Rehabilitation Fund mandated by law has not been created in most states.
The project will be rolled out in a phased manner and will begin with the South and South-East districts. (Representational) 
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