A Goal For Koradi

One of the women is 19-year-old Shehnaz Qureshi,who now coaches younger children in Koradi. Her mother,a domestic help,who supports her game,was “unsure” earlier,she says,“till I went to Rio de Janeiro last December (for a similar tournament called the Homeless World Cup) and learnt so much English that she was happy”. Qureshi wanted to become an air hostess but could not afford the fee a prominent training academy demanded. Disheartened,she began playing football at the ground near her house,where she would see a couple of children playing the sport in the evening. Of course,she didn’t know that it would,one day,help her fly. “When I first sat in the airplane to go to Rio De Janeiro,I felt overwhelmed. This was the place I wanted to work in,” remembers Qureshi,who also played in Berlin. Today,she is more hopeful of her air hostess dream coming true,as she is paid a Rs 2,000-stipend to coach juniors.

The idea of Slum Soccer struck Vijay Barse,a sports trainer for 30 years,when he saw a bunch of children kicking a half-broken bucket,imagining it to be a football,at a slum near his home in Civil Lines,Nagpur. Realising that sports can bring about change,he founded Slum Soccer (formerly called Krida Vikas Sanstha) in 1998,and began teaching football to children living in slums near his NGO’s first centre,in Civil Lines. Today,Slum Soccer has eight centres across Nagpur,each near a slum where the underprivileged get an opportunity to learn the game.

To motivate the children to play better,Slum Soccer organises games at its centres everyday,and holds,annually,a city-level tournament,a state-level competition and even a national tournament. This it does by tying up with NGOs in different states. Most of these NGOs,like Yuva in Jharkhand or Dream a Dream in Bangalore,work in slums but do not train children in football. So,Slum Soccer trains them for about a month in a year. This year,16 teams from different states participated in the national competition in Nagpur. The Slum Soccer National Tournament 2012 will be held in Coimbatore. “We hope to have at least 50 teams this year,” says Abhijeet (Vijay’s son). The team that played in Discover Football tournament had players from West Bengal,Jharkhand,Uttarakhand,Karnataka,Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra.

It doesn’t matter that children from Nagpur,who are trained all year round,have an edge over children from other cities. Explains Abhijeet: “The kids who come to play with us every evening or otherwise are taught to have a better attitude towards life. We try to make them confident,help them tackle aggression,and understand social responsibility. We eventually groom some of them into coaches,who are role models in their community. For instance,parents see Shehnaz play,and now let their girls out too.” The coaches are children who have been trained for some time and have gained enough skill and confidence to teach other children. So,while Qureshi has been playing for two years,31-year-old Akhilesh Prakash Paul has been with Slum Soccer for a decade. Paul says he ran away from home as a teenager because of domestic problems,and after seeking shelter for many nights at a graveyard,and later on the pavement outside Nagpur’s Yashwant stadium,he returned to his slum. There,he saw children enrolling in Slum Soccer games,and found a reason to live. Today,he coaches children of the Ganga-Jamuna slum,and was captain of the India team at the Homeless World Cup.

There are other inspiring stories. Amalendu Roy,23,ran away from his home in Silchar,Assam,after a tiff with his father. He got on a train to Nagpur,and began working as a security guard in a company near Datta Meghe College,Hingna,an industrial suburb off Nagpur. He would often go to the ground near the college to play football,and happened to be spotted by Vijay there. Roy was part of the India team at the Homeless World Cup in Australia in 2008,and in Brazil in 2010. Then,there’s Umesh Manohar Deshmukh,20,a coach at the Wadi and Bokhara slums. After staying at a remand home,Deshmukh landed up with Slum Soccer after bumping into Vijay at a church he often visited. After hearing his story,Vijay invited him to join the organisation. While Deshmukh idolises Ronaldinho,he doesn’t want to go his way. He,instead,wants to become a policeman. “I feel empowered here. That’s why I play,” says Deshmukh,who was also a part of the team that went to Brazil.

Things are moving up for Slum Soccer as well. It gets an annual grant of $15,000 from Street Football World,an organisation supported by FIFA. And has foreign coaches visiting it too. “Totenham Hotspur Club,in North London,gives us financial and technical support,” says Abhijeet,even as he prepares for the Homeless World Cup in France in August.