Mumbai is a boomtown teeming with technology and manufacturing companies, a thriving financial sector, busy shipping ports, and a robust movie industry producing over 300 films a day. Everywhere, I saw signs of a modern metropolis—modern skyscrapers, shiny condo high-rises, and construction cranes sharing the streets and skylines with Mumbai’s stately colonial architecture, shantytowns, and slums.
An estimated 35 million men and women in India work in the construction sector. As they shuttle from job to job to earn 60 to 80 rupees a day, some 54 million of their children are uprooted and left unattended. Many of the children suffer from malnutrition, tuberculosis, and accidents that occur on the building sites.
Few laws govern India’s construction industry, and an abundance of cheap labor translates into squalid living conditions, dubious pay, and few rights.But Mumbai Mobile Creches brings health, safety, education, and dignity to these families and their children.
In 1969, Meera Mahadevan started a rudimentary crèche when she saw babies—dirty, unclothed, and crying for milk—lying in the sun at the construction site for the Gandhi Centenary Exhibition in Delhi. Thus began Mobile Creches, a direct-service charity founded to protect children’s basic needs in Delhi. Meera inspired her sister to do the same in Mumbai.
Mumbai Mobile Creches (MMC), led by Devika Mahadevan, creates a healthy community for migrant workers on 23 construction sites, reaching 4,000 children. Believing that care and attention during the early years of a child’s life are crucial for mental, physical, emotional, and social growth, Mobile Creches provides comprehensive early childhood care and development programs in the form of traditional Indian balwadis, nurseries that provide education, daycare, and nutrition for children.
Mumbai Mobile Creches’ balwadis not only protect and promote the care of children but also train mothers to be teachers through an on-site training and certification program. Having a responsible role and job within the community increases these mothers’ self-esteem, and their training allows them to run a crèche once they move to another construction site.
For other women, Mumbai Mobile Creches offers security and safety for their children, allowing them freedom to work off-site, often as a domestic worker. It is not uncommon for some mothers to work three jobs! Unfortunately, many of them end up working for free since unscrupulous employers cheat them or do not pay them. In fact, this is one of the most common reasons people move on in search of the proverbial better job.
You might think construction companies would welcome Mumbai Mobile Creches on their sites, but as part of an industry that belittles the value of human capital, their response is usually resistance and suspicion. For example, India has a law mandating a crèche if a site has more than 20 women workers, but the construction companies ignore this, and the law is not enforced. The value of developing a workforce of qualified and experienced workers has not yet made its mark in the Indian construction industry.
Seeing the children and meeting their teachers and parents, I realized just how special and important Mumbai Mobile Creches is. I saw it in the joy of the children, the pride of their mothers, and the cleanliness and care in their community of makeshift shelters squeezed on the edge of a construction site behind tall gates leading to the city streets.
Thanks to the Mobile Creches, India’s migrant construction workers and their children are able to learn, to live with dignity, and to hope for a better future.
By Ahna Machan
Salute to Devika and Team MMC.
Source: http://www.gfcontheroad.org/?q=node/91#comment-754
Forget yourself for others, and others will never forget you.
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