India’s Street Kids Rule Like Kings Over Slums : Poverty: Rail station offers prospects for pimping, gambling, scalping of tickets. Some are fighting to rise above life of crime and drugs.

NEW DELHI — “Here I live like a king,” said Nassir, a resident of New Delhi’s railway station. “No family hassles. You work when you feel like it.”

Nassir was 13 when he arrived four years ago. Boys like him arrive daily. They flee a volatile family situation filled with poverty and cheap liquor, jump the first train that passes and make themselves at home in the terminal.

The station offers wide-ranging employment prospects--pimping, gambling and buying up tickets for popular Hindi movies to resell on the black market.

Nassir admits to earning about $1 a day carrying bags and securing seats on trains, which like most facilities in this nation of 850 million people are generally oversold.

Social workers estimate there are 100 million or more children younger than 15 who do not report for formal schooling. Most work alongside their parents in rural villages as farm laborers, carpet weavers or brick-makers.

Maybe a million of them have followed their parents to the mud-hut colonies of the cities, where they share a floor at night and learn the strategies of street survival by day.

For those who are able to resist the readily available low-grade heroin, major railway stations can offer a good living.

Pimps take 10% of the 50 cents prostitutes earn from customers solicited by the boys as they get off the trains.

The local crime bosses pay the boys to run gambling schemes, giving money to those who prove most nimble at sharping cards and tumbling dice.

A favorite gambling venue is between the tracks, a fair test of nonchalance as the diesel trains roll by on either side.

Food comes from the luxury trains that pull in from tourist towns like Agra and Jaipur. The boys race to claim the meals that are included in the ticket price but which many passengers don’t eat.

It can be a very expensive meal, according to social worker Shabnam Ahmed.

“I’ve had two boys in my group die that way,” Ahmed said. “They have to jump on and start scavenging before the train stops, in order to beat the registered coolies (porters) to the food. If you miss, you’re crushed.”

These days Nassir and many like him in Delhi have the opportunity to rise above the life of crime and drugs offered on the street.

Two years ago Ahmed and a colleague, Jugnu Ramaswamy, established a charity called Street Survivors India. Its aim is to keep as many of the local children as possible off the street, away from crime, away from drugs and to give them a little bit of a head start.

Dhir Singh Chaudhary, the policeman with the impossible job of curbing vagrancy at the station, has given over the terrace of his two-story police post for literacy classes.

He has issued identity cards to pupils to stop his men from arresting them and he lets the boys use his toilets and water taps.

In return, the boys steer clear of heroin.

The deal reduces the number of comatose bundles that are periodically cleared from the platforms and dumped elsewhere.

There are no girls visible among the railway children.

“If you find a girl working on the street, she will have a home of sorts,” said Ahmed’s colleague. “Girls vanish pretty quickly from the streets. The pimps move in fast.”

Ahmed said she had seen the younger street girls emerge at night, selling balloons to car drivers in central Delhi. Often the girls are sold too. There is a widespread belief in India that a girl of 7 or 8 can cure venereal disease.

Ahmed and Ramaswamy set up their two-person charity with the modest goal of keeping girls like Pinkie, an 8-year-old who keeps house for her family, just the way they are.

“My father is a cobbler and my mother is a beggar and I have three sisters and one brother,” said Pinkie unstoppably.

“I am the oldest so I look after the others, except the baby. My mother takes him begging because people give more.

“Come and see my house. I wash the clothes and my mother’s clothes and I sweep and I wash the utensils and I carry the water from the tap across the road in a huge pot like, this big.”

The water pot is not quite that big. But Pinkie’s house, built of mud and debris, and the front yard, marked off by a low mud wall from the yard-wide alleyway, are immaculate.

About 50,000 people live in Pinkie’s slum. Her family’s living space, just over one square yard per person, is average. The communal latrine is the adjacent municipal rubbish dump. She will be married at puberty.

Pinkie is one of about 60 children whom Ahmed and Ramaswamy have lured to their school, a thatched hut built long and narrow to fit the awkward plot which the parents granted them.

Ahmed and other volunteers, including boys from the station, teach basic Hindi and craft work for three hours a day.

That is as long as the parents can afford to let the children skip work, which is mainly begging and hawking.

The school doubles as a day-care center for baby-sitters like Pinkie. It also feeds her. Volunteers bring in fruit, nuts and bread. A businessman supplies ice cream once a week.

Normally, Pinkie gets tea with a dash of milk for breakfast. Lunch and dinner are chapatis --flat, griddle-baked bread circles. These come with vegetables--if her parents have had a good day--and with a chutney of chili and garlic, if they haven’t.

Has her mother had a good day begging outside Delhi’s main mosque?

“How should I know? They wouldn’t tell me,” Pinkie answers with matronly innocence.

Here at the railway station, a charity worker says, “The freedom comes at a price.”