Context
MS Public School Council for Vulnerable Children (PCVC) started as an outreach program with extensive intervention work in the urban communities of Mumbai consisting of poor migrant families.
We identified thousands of working children between 6 and 18 years of age, engaged in industries like bag-making, shoe-making, cap-making, zari, gold polishing etc. Most of these children were migrants primarily belonging to Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan.
The outreach’s major intervention was to rescue children in coordination with the police and the Labour Department and persuading employers not to employ children for work.
Approach
MS Public School Council for Vulnerable Children (PCVC) strategy includes direct work with children and families in vulnerable communities. Indirect work as a resource organisation involves training of different stakeholders working in the field of child protection and partnership with necessary government departments to address these concerns.
PCVC addresses the issues of child rights through multipronged interventions. PCVC’s overall focus is on prevention, remediation, rehabilitation, policy advocacy and documentation for evidence-based practice.
One of the key programs of PCVC is to rescue child labourers from exploitative situations. The aim is to repatriate these children back to their homes and seek rehabilitative measures to sustain them in their local and home settings. To facilitate this, PCVC has established various inter-state connections with the respective government departments, at both source and receiving ends. PCVC also works at important source and receiving points at railway stations in order to mitigate unsafe migration and trafficking of children as a major prevention operation.
On the rehabilitation front, PCVC provides educational sponsorship for the rescued child labourers. This is for the children who attend school on a regular basis (up to 70% attendance) and their progress is monitored by PCVC staff in consultation with the schools. Another rehabilitation initiative is the Family Assistance Project which provides livelihood to the families of these vulnerable children to ensure the sustenance of children in education net and protects them from getting into any harmful practices like child labour. In the past, PCVC has run residential shelters for rescued child labourers in their home state as a demonstration of best practices for the state.
