Groupm -8 (Aman , Megha and Sinto)

INTRODUCTION

APSA is a grassroots and child-rights, urban development organisation with a focus on child centred community development in urban slums, street children, child labourers and other children in distress (child victims of prostitution, abandoned children, runaway children, etc.).The organisation was started in 1981 by a group of youth with trade union and sociology backgrounds with a mission of empowering the underprivileged sections of the community especially in the slums of Hyderabad and Bangalore. APSA's work is directed towards (child) inhabitants in five slum areas and the street children of the city.

We are... A rights-based child-centered community development organisation. We work towards the development of the community through a systematic process of empowerment. Our partners in its process are communities of street children, child labourers and other children in distress, including abandoned and runaway children, child victims of abuse and prostitution, children of sex workers as well as the larger communities of the urban slums. APSA, with more than two decades of grassroots experience, has led from the front in designing unique programs. It combines paradigms of self-sufficiency at the micro level with advocacy campaigns and policy planning the state and national levels. APSA believes in the strength of the People and their ability to fight for their own rights. We build our work on the premise that all people have equal rights irrespective of their socioeconomic, political or cultural backgrounds.

Our Vision. We will work with the community at the grassroots, with the privileged sections of the society and with the government towards preventing exploitation and marginalization of the underprivileged and to evolve social paradigms based on values of justice and nondiscrimination with those already in exploitative situations.

Our Mission. To catalyze the process by which underprivileged and deprived communities use their own strengths and efforts to solve their problems and improve the quality of their lives. To evolve new social paradigms within which comprehensive plans could create better lives for the communities with which we work. To enable social development rooted in justice and equity through local peoples organizations devoted to social mobilization, conscientiation and economic and political empowerment. To ensure the participation of populations frequently under-represented in development especially women and children. To strengthen the expression of local cultures and issues through the use of traditional and folk forms of art, theatre, literature and music.

The Beginning In 1976, when a group of about eight young people decided to intervene to improve the exploitative conditions under which the coolies (loading and unloading workers) of the Secunderabad railway station worked, the seeds of APSA were sown. By 1981, APSA was formally registered and the coolies were sitting across the table from their employers, negotiating on new terms of strength. However, their untold suffering and the search for their liberation had led APSAs workers on a path of more questions than answers, making their future more complex and uncertain. The problem was not merely of a solitary exploited section of workers, but of young children on the streets with no choice but to work for a living, of urban slums and new migrants to the cities with no skills with which to negotiate the system. APSA grew, impelled by the collective will of a few activists determined to make a change in the uncertain and exploitative contexts in which these human begins tried to solve problems of survival and to build decent lives. APSAs history too has been one of survival against many challenges. Today, APSA with its team of professionals and activists has over ten different projects in Hyderabad and Bangalore testifying to its ability to empower the dispossessed to fight for their own rights

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N a m m a

n e ( O u r H o m e )

Nammane (Our Home) combines a Crisis Intervention Center for children in acute distress with APSAs Regional Residential Training Center for street and working children. children, and with an eye to their histories of exploitation, Nammane has evolved over the years to provide timely, multifaceted help and appropriate alternatives for children from a variety of difficult backgrounds: Child labourers,Street children Child victims of domestic violence Child victims of physical or sexual abuse Abandoned or runaway children Children in distress or rescued from Dangerous situations Children come to Nammane from workplaces, the streets or slums backgrounds which are, at the very least, not conductive to their development, or, at worst, places where they can be abused and drawn into drug abuse, crime and other undesirable social and personal situations after having been identified by APSAs field projects. During their time at Nammane, children receive a safe environment, care, counseling and alternatives which may help them retrieve some part of their childhood. The two main components of Nammane are: 24-hour crisis intervention center for children in distress. Nammane is open to all Children in need of residential support. It also provides all the required components to resolve the childs distressed situation. Long-term rehabilitation for street, working and slum children. Individual actualization helps find appropriate alternatives for each child through education and vocational training programs. Nammane has over 180 children on any given day and over the past ten years has given 2,500 children opportunities to break the vicious cycle of exploitation they had known earlier and to build a secure future. More than half have graduated from our skill training centers and are working as professionals.

The Appropriate Education Project

APSA is making a systematic effort to encourage children from laboring, slum and street backgrounds back into the regular school system. As an alternative, APSA is also redefining the concept of education itself for actual and potential drop-outs, with a variety of modules of formal and non-formal education. These include:

Child labourers centers in slums Potential child laborer (PCL) centers in slums PCLs are students of public schools at risk of dropping out without intervention Formal education through a bridge course that prepares middle and highschool drop-outs to take up 7th and 10th standard public exams Non-formal classes for children in distress Vocational based literacy and numerically classes that complement a skill training of the child's choice Life skill based education Question hour classes that finds answers to all the questions that a child may have

APSA has education centers at Nammane and in over 50 slum and street locations in the two cities of Bangalore and Hyderabad. The education project works together with the street children and child and child labor projects to serve over 2000 children each year.

KAUSHALYA, Vocational Training center APSAs state of the art training centers provide high quality need directed training as a strategy against poverty and unskilled, underpaid child labor. The skill training project is part of five year rehabilitation continuum that takes the children form our field projects through a process of professional development. The 18 month per-Nammane stage involves the identification and preparation of prospective students. The residential training at Nammane ranges from 6 to 18 months and finally a follow-up team takes over the responsibility of providing support for the graduate in the first two years of employment. Our students are as competent as university graduates and are employed in the same workplaces. In the past decade, over 2,000 former child labourers have graduated and been suitably placed. Skills taught vary with the market demand. Currently, training programs include:

Desktop Publishing Tailoring Screen Printing and Stationery Making Electrical Work

Slum Outreach Project APSA facilitates development programs in over 135 slums in Bangalore and Hyderabad, touching over 200,000 people. Our projects are based on the following principles: Right to information Political empowerment Economic empowerment APSA has built local level peoples institutions in all 135 slums, especially involving women and youth, aiming towards obtaining basic rights, amenities and services such as land and housing security, drinking water, sanitation, ration cards and enlistment in voters lists. APSA is the only organisation working with the communities in slums alongside railway tracks towards meeting these goals. In Bangalore, there are 64 such slums. In just over a year and a half, APSA has made the problems of railway slums an issue in the public consciousness. Rigorous grass roots level social mobilization, legal aid, and government networking have made this a possibility. Consequently, two communities have received official recognition from the Slum Clearance Board and are in the process of relocation. There has been a subsequent mobilization of nearly four crones of rupees (approximately one million US dollars) in Government funds sanctioned for group housing, loans for self-help groups and entrepreneurial grants. Self Help Group Project This project aims at creating an alternative credit paradigm for the urban poor involving Over 3,000 women in Bangalore and Hyderabad. The inspiration to build SHGs rests upon our first hand experiences of economic exploitation in slum communities and the myriad forms of suffering that result thereof. After dispelling a long-standing myth amongst NGOs that money matters in the urban slums are dangerous, we have now resolved and are committed to organized

savings and credit activities in the slums, working towards effective economic empowerment. With this basic foundation laid, the concept was concretized into a separate project with aim of bringing about a qualitative change in the lives of families in the slums through economic empowerment, by encouraging women to initiate and participate in self-help groups and other income-generating activities. Not only do the women work towards making their groups bankable institutions, they also go beyond the financial perspective and, through these groups, reinforce positive aspects of their cultures and societies. The result is that these groups become effective means for transforming their communities as a whole.

Child Labor Project One of the earlier organizations responsible for making child labor an issue in the country, APSA has two decades of direct experience pioneering preventive and rehabilitative programs for urban child labourers. We are also a major advocacy and resource organisation. Our grassroots work has shown that the economic exploitation of children is framed in a vicious cycle linking poverty, illiteracy and child labor. Promoting education as the sole solution for street children, child labourers and school drop-outs is Herculean task. Mere physical removal of the child from the exploitative situation is inadequate to tackle such a deep-rooted and concealed problem. The compulsory primary education approach with its ambiguous dependence upon parents to send the children to school is also not practicable without the provision of adequate infrastructure and locally appropriate education by the state. We believe that every child in the slums is a potential child laborer. For our interventions to be truly effective, it is essential that we deal with these issues not only at the level of the child but also of the family, the community and the development model as a whole. The participation of the child is also a necessary factor in the success of such programs.

Street Childrens and Communities Project Bangalore has an estimated 75,000 street children. There are a combination of those on and of the street and those who are completely abandoned. They usually live in groups in self-dedicated areas of Bangalore. All of them are subject to severe kinds of exploitation, physical, sexual or financial. Substance abuse, highrisk sexual behavior and non-availability of basic services are issues of immediate concern. While acknowledging that there may be good enough reasons for it, APSA recognizes that drug abuse among street children is a real

problem. We believe that if a child receives adequate and timely services, she can kick the habit, and try to provide support systems that help. There are a number of communities with street-based occupations such as cobblers, street vendors etc who are also tied into this cycle of exploitation. The Child Help Line and Police Training APSA is a founding and core-group member of Makkala Sahaya Vani the Child Help Line. MSV collaborates with the Bangalore City Police to rescue, counsel and rehabilitate children acute distress. The counseling center is at the Police Commissioners office and all the police patrol vehicles of the city are prepared for rescue operations. APSA assists in crisis resolution and provides emergency residence and care for those in need through Nammane. Nammane has helped MSV rehabilitate more than 250 children identified through the help line. To strengthen the child safety net and to make the collaboration more meaningful, APSA is also involved in training the Bangalore City Police on issues related to children. We equip the government machinery to view the problems of children contextually, encouraging them not only to provide shortsighted to problems but to relate to the systemic causes. The topics for training are:

The Convention on the Rights of the Child Working with children in difficult circumstances, particularly drug addiction General awareness of children in difficult circumstances

With MSV, APSA has designed this training module to bring police personnel and children together to learn about each other. Serving as a major trainer for the City Police, we have trained 1,700 personnel. We regularly work with three police stations in follow-up training sessions.

The Disability Project A slum, by definition, is a place of adverse living conditions. When one is disabled, these difficulties are greatly multiplied. The Disability Project is APSAs attempt to reach out to the most disadvantaged of the urban poor. APSA envisions a society in which people with disabilities will have equal opportunity and participation. Towards this goal, APSA has undertaken a Therapeutic and Social inclusion Project for about seventy children with disabilities in seven Bangalore slums. This project involves a preventive component.

The program aims at initiating a Community-Based Rehabilitation Program in four slums, providing mobility aids, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, appropriate active Technology and opportunities for integrated schooling, vocational training and employment. APSA will also network with other organizations active in the disability sector for awareness creation, advocacy and improved services. Inchara (The Bird song) A Childrens cultural group, Inchara motivates talented children, irrespective of their background, to express themselves through street plays, puppetry, clay modeling, painting etc. The theatre group works on the principles of peoples theatre and has performed at venues across the world. Children learn to employ cultural activities as tools for struggle and social mobilization. The cultural activists of APSA work in various formal and informal venues in the streets and in slums. Through its projects, Inchara seeks to provide a means for constructive recreation for young people, to train them in skills which they might be able to use professionally, and to strengthen migrants cultural roots which are too easily forgotten in a city. Among other significant public places, Inchara childrens work can be found on display in the Bangalore Police Commissioners Office.

VIKAS A one-of-a-kind project, Vikas is a student awareness-raising program that orients and motivates youth to participate in development work for the poor. The divide between the upper and lower classes of Indian society is notoriously wide while the average Bangalorean may very well be unaware of the several thousand person slum that he or she passes every day, Bangalore has over 700 slums providing homes for 1,400,000 people. Vikas is APSAs attempt to involve students from the middle and upper classes working regularly with street

children, child labourers and the urban poor. Over the past three years, APSA has employed this model of experiential learning in working with 300 students from Christ College of Bangalore University, Bringing them systematically through an educational continuum from their first contacts with these communities through to a fuller awareness of their role in such a society, and what that role can and should be. Since its inception, Vikas has seen a explosion of social activism and awareness on Christ Colleges campus the colleges National Service Scheme Program has expanded into a full-fledged department, the Center for Social Action; students have been involved in sponsorship program, tuitions in a slum community, the establishment of an external loan source for micro-credit selfhelp groups, and a number of other projects. For a positive change to occur, it is essential that all sectors of society be involved. By engaging itself in education today, APSA hopes to help influence to leaders of tomorrow.

Navajeevana Nilaya APSA Navajeevana is an enabling environment for young women at risk, providing them with residential support during the first year of their employment together with opportunities to development of skills necessary for them to live confidently and independently without compromising their security. Objectives If a young woman at risk decides to change her destiny by wanting to live independently and pursue a profession of her choice, there are hardly any facilities in urban India that support her initiative. Navajeevana is a unique model-hostel that encourages young women to share their resources and run their own hostel during the crucial years of transition from an exploitative background to being empowered young women.

A protective environment for girls and young women in crisis A cost-effective but a high-value working girls/ women s is hostel Identification and development of their inherent qualities, capacities, and strengths Institutional support to enable the girls to be independent women Enhancement of their personality for a healthy overall development Active participation of the resident in all the aspects of the hostel

EXPERIENCE

Working with street children and child labourers, We became acutely aware of the dangers they faced in the form of physical and sexual abuse at the workplace and on the streets, especially at night. There was an urgent need to initiate a solution that would protect them from further harm. Child labourers Street children Child victims of domestic violence Child victims of physical or sexual abuse Abandoned or runaway children Children in distress or rescued from Dangerous situations