The Other Railway Children, 'An increasing awareness'

A number of events in 2009 really put the charity on the map. Firstly and somewhat unexpectedly, we were contacted by Jade Goody’s agent and asked if we would support Jade as she wanted to visit India. Apparently she intended to donate her fee from a recent television programme to a charity working for children in that country. We considered the request and conferred with Mrinalini in India on the possible reaction there if we were to accept. Our own gut instinct was to accept provided our Indian staff did not feel it would cause problems for them as media publicity surrounding Jade at the time was immense.

Mrinalini invited Jade to go to India and meet some street children for whom a donation would be of assistance. Jade accepted the invitation and Mrinalini conducted her around Delhi and visited one of our partners there, ‘Anubhav’, a small project adjacent to Delhi Cantonment station, pursued by the media of course. However, she did get some privacy with the children and spent a few hours sitting on the primitive floor of their drop-in centre talking with them. She got on splendidly with them - she could empathise with them in many aspects of their lives. Towards the end of her visit she asked the children if they had any questions and one of the boys asked, “Is it right that you said nasty things on TV?” When Jade admitted that she’d said things which had been criticised, the boy said that he wasn’t sure what all the fuss was about because they said nasty things to each other all the time!

Jade offered the children the opportunity of asking for a gift and they asked if they could have a computer which was duly given to them. They also wanted a cricket coach! One of the children then asked, “When you go on holiday, will you take us with you to Goa?” The media picked up this visit and the Sun gave it a positive two page spread which was glorious publicity for us, and among a readership that did not feature heavily on our database.

The children got on famously with Jade and liked her earthy approach which they understood and felt comfortable with. That contrasted with another visit I heard about, when an Indian professional woman living in the UK, a solicitor I think but I’m not sure, wanted to visit but made the children feel very small with her superior and patronising approach. The children were upset when they heard of Jade’s cancer and sent her a message, which was again featured in headlines in the Sun.

We featured in the Sun again that year. This time it was because of the Danny Boyle film, ‘Slumdog Millionaire’. The street children featured in that film which got the media headlines were just the sort of children we were trying to help in the Mumbai area - indeed we had - and still have - a project on VT station (correct name Chhatrapati Shivaji Station or CST for short but everyone still calls it VT or Victoria Terminus) where substantial parts of ‘Slumdog’ were filmed. When I saw the film I was amazed at how the film company had managed to clear the station for the final dance sequence until I caught a glance of the station clock which was showing 00.58. Some of the film was pretty distressing in depicting the abuse suffered by such children and a newspaper got hold of a copy of the film and showed it to a few of our children in Mumbai, asking if it was an accurate reflection of their lives. They agreed on the whole although there was one big exception, they said. “We’re not millionaires at the end!”

The Railway Children staff went to see it ‘en bloc’ when the film was released and came back into the office to discuss how the film could be used to raise awareness and support for our Indian programme. Two initiatives were followed up and bore fruit. One of our staff managed to contact Danny Boyle through his sister and got him to agree that he and Dev Patel, the star of the film playing the ‘Slumdog’ would enter the UK ITV ‘Celebrity Millionaire’ series on behalf of Railway Children. ITV agreed enthusiastically and the Sun featured this and the Railway Children in the publicity following the film’s Oscar awards. Unfortunately the promised programme has not yet been filmed because of the difficulty of getting Danny and Dev in the country at the same time when filming for the series is scheduled. Maybe one day…. Perhaps the programme would like to mirror the film and see that they win the £1 million for us…!

The second break came through an initiative by our Corporate Fundraiser, Dave Ellis. He contacted a Tesco manager he knew from his work in the commercial sector before he joined Railway Children. That was followed up and the upshot was a promise by Tesco to feature Railway Children’s literature in the launch of the ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ DVD in the first two weeks after its release in June 2009 and donate £1 for every DVD sold during its special promotion at every Tesco store that fortnight. The result was fantastic and beyond our expectations and above Tesco’s budget for that period - they sold 251,948 copies so we received unrestricted funds of over a quarter of a million pounds towards our Indian street children programme.

This led to a further event to raise the awareness of our charity. Channel 4 TV regularly programmes a hard hitting documentary in their ‘Dispatches’ series and in January 2010 showed a documentary entitled ‘The Real Slumdog Children’. This had been filmed in Mumbai by freelance company ‘True Vision’ with Railway Children and featured a former street boy from VT station called Santosh who had been employed in the Railway Children office at one time and now had his own business. BBC has also been showing a series of documentaries on Indian Railways in the last year or so - ‘Monsoon Railway’, ‘Bombay Railway’ and another series about India’s Hill Railways - which, although not specifically about street children had several shots and mentions of ‘railway children’ on the platforms.

This programme had a big impact and as a result the same film company produced a second documentary in the ‘Dispatches’ series based on our UK work, called ‘Britain’s Street Children’. This made an even greater impact and the ‘star’ of the programme was a young girl, ‘Robyn’, from Edinburgh who evinced great sympathy and support for her efforts to kick her heroin habit into which she’d been introduced by others at 11 years of age. She is currently completing a ‘drug rehab’ programme in South Africa at Railway Children expense as we couldn’t find a UK programme prepared to tackle her heavy addiction level.