Staging a real life drama

PUNE, NOV 19: An alchoholic father. A mother who is always at the receiving end. And a son, barely eight-year-old, is forced to eke out a...

PUNE, NOV 19: An alchoholic father. A mother who is always at the receiving end. And a son, barely eight-year-old, is forced to eke out a meagre living8230;

This is a play that unfolds as the children, all farm labourers, are acting it out at the Garware Bal Bhawan as a part of the two-day Bal Pratishthan.All fiction till you meet Raju Antony 12. Antony, sitting with his friends, is a living example of what is being acted out on stage. His mother left him when he was barely two and his father was more interested in hitting the bottle and him. So he ran away from home in Belgaum, came to Pune only to be picked up by the police.

Today he goes to a local school and prefers the remand room to his home in Belgaum. 8220;I don8217;t want to meet my father and I like it here better.8221; Ambition in life8230;to be an engineer some day.

Something that the Action for the Rights of a Child ARC is lobbying with the State and Central Government for a decent life and education for the millions of children who are working.

The two-day programme which was flagged off yesterday by Municipal Commissioner Ratnakar Gaikwad saw a host of plays, entertainment programmes, and most important, group discussions as the children got a chance to express themselves. The discussions were an attempt to bring out the problems of the child in his poverty-stricken environment and his place in society amidst stark reality.

Be it abusive parents, lack of education, insensitive employers or crippling poverty, the children had an opinion as film and theatre personality Ratna Pathak Shah interacted with them on the second day.

8220;Nobody would condone child labour,8221; she said, 8220;so I wanted to lend my support to them and their cause.8221; She has been working in Mumbai with the kids from municipal schools trying to bring about a paradigm shift in their methods of education. 8220;More discussions are encouraged and the feed back has been amazing.8221;

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8220;Most of the children here are either farm labourers or domestic helps,8221; pointed out Mini Srinivasan, a worker with ARC. 8220;To address child labour we need to ensure that their parents have a better life. Once they get better wages their children will get better lives.8221; So they are interacting with the employers, the building contractors and others of their fraternity to sensitise them about the problems of the children and their parents.

Also on the cards are projects to educate and help provide additional tutorials to the kids so that they stick to their school curriculum. This, Srinivasan says, will help prevent the number of school drop outs.

Most of the kids who spoke at the forum today had different problems. Some did not have access to a school, or those who had, did not have attentive teachers. Some wanted better playing facilities and the girls had one request: 8220;Let us study.8221;

All in all, an effort to make people realise that India, like its Asian neighbours still carries the burden of child labour.