From Goldman Sachs to the Delhi Slums

Nicholas Tiffou shares his thoughts during his first week in India 

Sunday: Romee, from London

Next week, Romee, our youngest son, is turning 6. Our family (my wife, 3 other children and me) will gather around him to celebrate this event in Delhi as we are spending 4 months here at the end of my secondment from Goldman Sachs to Save the Children. I am helping Save the Children India build their crucial newborn and child survival campaign and after 7 months in London  helping  to build  the global campaign ,  I am finally here working with the team on the ground in India – the country with the highest number of children dying anywhere in the world.

Sunday: Asif, from Delhi

Last Saturday, we meet Asif. He lives in a large building in North Delhi and he is also probably 6 years old but looks much younger.  Asif greets us with a big smile and by touching our hands, which he keeps on doing during our day together. He also does not stop smiling. No one can be quite sure of his age because he lives in an orphanage, well catered by nuns, where he was taken 3 years ago. Police brought him here after finding him on a train abandoned by his parents.  The reason why he keeps touching our hands is that he is blind.

Romee and Asif

Our exposure so far to the every day suffering of children around the world had been largely theoretical, through various reports or the media. By just being in India we could not be blind to the reality of children begging, being undernourished, out of school, working in the streets as tea-wallah or on the construction sites. However meeting Asif is a revelation for us all because it gives a name, a voice and flesh to all those injustices Save the Children and others are working to fix. It also shows, through the care he is receiving in the orphanage, that what I could possibly imagine as a 'worst nightmare' (being abandoned on a train by your parents, aged 3, blind) is not the end of the road. Asif, in the most desperate of situations is receiving help.

For my children, no need any longer to for lectures about 'how lucky they are'. Asif is their brother.

Monday: En route to Sanjay colony

It’s Monday and my first day at work in India. I am with a team of Save the Children staff heading into a slum cluster in north west Delhi called Sanjay colony.  On the way, there is a gigantic rubbish tip with trucks coming to unload bags of rubbish that have been produced by some of the 16 million inhabitants of Delhi.  From our car we can clearly see the silhouettes of people, many of them children, following the trucks to the unloading station in the hope of gathering something ‘valuable’. I hear that, as usual in India, there is a hierarchy even for the rubbish seekers: those that get first access to the bag are high up the list and may even be able to send their children to school.

Inside a day care centre

Sanjay colony is one of the worst slums in Delhi. About 10,000 people live amongst piles of rubbish, patiently grazed by skinny cows, and made worst by the monsoon season: mud, stagnant puddles, blocked sewages, unclean water, and viscous mosquitoes carrying Dengue fever.

We start our visit by a day centre (a small 6sqm room) where a Save the Children supported female health worker from the community is teaching 6 women with their babies the basics of post natal care, how to spot signs of a disease, how to breastfeed etc…  These women all gave birth in an institution and their babies are healthy. They are doing very well but I find out later that one of them, here with her only child lost her first 3 babies in pregnancy. We also hear that sometimes, if they believe their sick baby’s condition to be benign, they opt not to go to the doctor simply because of the cost.

Back from school

Just before leaving the slum I see a boy walking past us. He must be 7 years old; he wears a school uniform, hair well combed, shirt buttoned up and tucked in, tie knotted; and on his back a heavy school bag.  He is on his way home from school. Home is amongst the junk piles and his playground is the rubbish dump.

The mobile clinic

In the afternoon we visit Save the Children’s mobile clinic. It is here for 3 hours and 2 doctors give 2 minute consultations to a queue of women carrying their babies, waiting in the scorching heat to be called on to the bus. The babies are displaying similar symptoms, diarrhoea, pale, feverish. The bus visits once a week for 3 hours and at this rate 180 people are receiving treatment. The bus goes to 10 different sites in a week; 1800 people; in a year that is 90,000 visits. Of course, that is inaccurate. There are repeat visitors, queues vary -  but still, it works. Those people that I saw there waiting are receiving advice and free treatments and lives are being saved. Six more of these mobile clinics will be funded and operational from November. I know my maths are wrong but I can’t help thinking 90,000*7= 630,000. And this is only a part of Delhi.

Wednesday: Advocacy 101

It’s now Wednesday of week one and totally new décor. This is the posh Constitution Club at Patel House in Delhi.  Upon learning that the Indian Prime Minister is not going to go to the forthcoming global UN summit, Save the Children India has managed - in about 10 days – to rally around a table 22 NGOs, key health and nutrition activists, eminent pediatricians and the most senior government official in charge of child health. At the end of the day, there is wide consensus among the NGOs to capture the essence of the Asks to the government in an open letter.

It is remarkable to have staged this gathering so quickly, to manage to talk to the government in a frank but constructive tone and to converge on actionable points. Obviously, the problems described are daunting. Worn-out generalities about focusing on the poorest and the most excluded will not change their fate, but there seems to be some level of understanding of the task at hand.

By the end of the week we hear that Sonia Gandhi will be leading the Indian delegation to the UN Summit. This is great news and shows real commitment from the Government to the tackling child mortality in India.

Friday: Child Mortality and Save the Children

This week has been a wake-up call. It is at grassroots that the campaign is happening and must be supported. The task is not just a lofty ambition to ‘help get the world back on track to achieve MDG4 to reduce child mortality’. It is about saving those children in Delhi, and Bihar, Rajasthan, one by one, every one and work constructively and humbly here in the community and in partnership with others to do it.

I want to thank Pradeep and the Delhi Save the Children team for showing me how the campaign really works.

Nicholas Tiffou is on secondment to Save the Children from Goldman Sachs 

Commonwealth Games: Has India got its priorities right?

By Kathryn Rawe, Media Team, Save the Children UK

Delhi was tense before the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony. Roads were blocked around the big tourist sights and armed police stopped the drivers of the yellow and green auto rickshaws from dropping their passengers outside key landmarks.  The popular Lodhi gardens, normally thronging with Sunday strollers and family picnics, were almost deserted bar a few guards and a handful of western tourists. The city waited with bated breath for the games to begin.

But later watching the opening ceremony, it became clear that Delhi was about to host an event that India would be proud of. The organizing committee had managed to put all the negative reports behind them and the opening ceremony went off without a hitch with fireworks, drumming and more than 7,000 athletes trouping into the stadium.

As an NGO worker in a country that is celebrating its position as global host, you could be seen to be a bit of a killjoy when trying to draw attention to what is going on away from the flash and ceremony of an event like the commonwealth games. But you do have to question whether India has got its priorities quite right.

On the Friday before the opening ceremony I went with one of Save the Children’s partners to the east of the city where hundreds of families had seen their homes destroyed when the Yamuna river flooded. As the roads were the only high ground, the pavement had become a ramshackle campsite. Crammed tightly together, roughly erected tents ran along both sides of the dual carriageway.  Crawling along at Delhi-traffic speed meant any passerby could stare into these families’ homes and see just how they were living. Children sat on the bare concrete by the side of the road with no possessions, no safety and nowhere to play.

And a few kilometres away on a road that would be used by commonwealth traffic the story got even worse. Families in that part of town had also moved onto a roadbridge for higher ground. But a few days ago they were reportedly forced by the police to move off the road back to the sludge of the river bed so those travelling to the games would not have to witness their destitution.

“Even if you said you would take me to stadium to watch the games, I wouldn’t go,” said Salman, (who was unsure of his age but was likely eight or nine). ‘The games have  been bad for my family. There are 12 of us and our tent is knee-deep in mud.” He used to get handouts of food from passersby, but out of sight on the river-bed nobody has come to his family’s aid for days.

Eight million people – half of Delhi’s population – live in slums and shanty towns and almost two million children die every year in India from diseases that are easy to prevent and treat. While the political will to host the games has been found, along with $6 billion to build stadiums and improve infrastructure, that same will to save children’s lives so far has not.

The budget for India’s national scheme to tackle childhood malnutrition – the Integrated Childhood Development Scheme – is only a quarter of what has been spent preparing for the commonwealth games.

Killjoy or not, it’s shameful and unjustifiable that in a country that is ecnomically booming, children like Salman are suffering the consequences. The effects of India’s growth are not reaching its poor.