Trying to Rescue India's Endangered Kids

NEW DELHI, India, Oct. 28, 2007 — -- Dhiren is 13 years old. Until two months ago, he lived on the streets of New Delhi, India, addicted to drugs, orphaned by his parents. Speaking to a reporter who is obviously foreign, he asks not for help but about something he's seen on TV.

"You are from HBO? HBO Movies? X-Men! Yes, you are actor. X-Men! With the hair!" He slashes his right hand through the air as Wolverine does. He stares for a minute, shrugs his shoulders, and walks away, joining his friends.

Today, Dhiren lives about 30 miles outside of Delhi in a school for 20 children, one part of a network that calls itself the Bounded Labor Liberation Front. It is a group dedicated to helping members of the underclass of India, the children who have become the enablers of western profits -- 10-, 12-, 14-year-old kids who spend long days making t-shirts and jeans sold for more than each one will make in a year.

"Previously, nobody knows about these childrens," Sheotaj Singh says in his stilted English. Professor Singh is the general secretary of the Bounded Labor Liberation Front, which he helped create 30 years ago. Now he helps run the Belpa school, where Dhiren and 19 other young students are taught to become productive members of society.

Whether they are former sweatshop workers or children like Dhiren, found alone in the bus and railway stations of Delhi, the Bounded Labor Liberation Front rescues children usually left to a destiny of forced work or, sometimes, homelessness. There is no government infrastructure to help these people, though there are laws against child labor.

"The whole system is corrupt," Professor Singh says. "These are children doing work under the very noses of the government agencies in Delhi. ... The government pick up them and send them to the refinery or jails, and nothing more. But after that, they have to release them after some time, and again, they go through the same system" -- never fully escaping from the shadows in which they've lived for years.

The school consists of one courtyard and one building. In the dirt courtyard, to entertain the visiting journalists, the school's two teachers and one volunteer lead what look like boot camp exercises. The students line up neatly and perform jumping jacks, karate kicks, and somewhat awkward calisthenics in syncopated rhythms.