CASE STUDY
     
 
Nammane (Our Home)
Nammane (“Our Home”) combines a Crisis Intervention Center for children in acute distress with APSA’s Regional Residential Training Center for street and working children.

Working with street children and child labourers, APSA 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.

APSA’s initiative took the form of Nammane, which began in 1991 as a night shelter with a minimal nutritional component. According to needs identified by the 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 APSA’s 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 child’s 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 – PCL’s are students of public schools at risk of dropping out without intervention
  • Formal education through a bridge course that prepares middle and high-school 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
APSA’s 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 people’s 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 SHG’s 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 NGO’s 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 Children’s 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, high-risk 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 Commissioner’s 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 short-sighted 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 APSA’s 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 Children’s 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 people’s 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 children’s work can be found on display in the Bangalore Police Commissioner’s 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 APSA’s 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 College’s campus – the college’s National Service Scheme Program has expanded into a full-fledged department, the Center for Social Action; students have been involved in sponsorship program, tuition’s in a slum community, the establishment of an external loan source for micro-credit self-help 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
   
  Juvenile Justice
    One of APSA’s projects is Nammane, a residential shelter for street, working children and children in distress. Although an institution, and as such, not the ideal situation for children, the employment of democratic systems, proactive planning and various checks and balances have made Nammane, a model among institutions which provide care for children in difficult circumstances like street and working children, physically and sexually abused children, missing, runaway and children in crisis. Our frequent interactions with the Department of Women and Child Development (DWCD) and the advocacy of our work with agencies of the Government have led to the development of a strong, collaborative relationship with the government.

CCL, APSA and other NGO’s strongly advocated with the DWCD about the NGO participation in running of the Govt. Homes with the help of the Andra Pradesh model of co-managing the Govt. homes with NGO’s. This resulted in formation of the “Home Committees” and APSA with its experiences in running an open shelter was nominated as a member for Children’s home boys and girls which were earlier known as Juvenile Homes. In Karnataka the department has 46 children’s homes which include 1 home for children below 6 years and 2 special homes for children in need of care and protection, 5 observation homes for children in conflict with law.

2 years of work and experiences in the field of Juvenile Justice led APSA for a new initiative in the form of “Juvenile Justice Project”.

The association has been grounded in the objective of using knowledge built by the mutual sharing of experiences and learning together with the Govt. homes and working on the strengths of the individuals to evolve best practices and develop the government homes into ‘child-friendly homes’ and create replicable models.

The Juvenile Justice Project Aims to achieve

  • Working directly with 2 homes Govt. homes i.e., Children’s home for boys and girls in Bangalore urban.
  • Capacity building of the J. J. functionaries of Karnataka.
  • Identification of systemic, administrative and functional issues of Juvenile Justice Institutions.
  • Develop an external resource group and actively link them with the J. J. Institutions through out the state.
  • Meaningful implementation of the recommendations of the J. J. Act. 2000.
  • Work with the DWCD in bringing systemic changes in the functions of Juvenile Justice Institutions.

Capacity building programs
Capacity building of Juvenile Justice Functionaries of Karnataka state in collaboration with the Department of Women and child development, Government of Karnataka. Beginning in November 2002, a series of training programmes was set in motion for the training of the staff of the entire Children’s homes and observation homes in Karnataka. APSA shared its expertise in helping to design the training modules and in conducting the training program.

  • We influenced the Department to include system reforms, child participation and restoration concepts within Juvenile homes along with an orientation to the new JJ act for the training programs.
  • The project took the lead in organizing a training programme along with Namamne team for the teachers and caregivers of all the government children’s homes and observation homes in Karnataka. The programme, which was held from the 21st to the 23rd of April, 2003 at Ashirwaad, Bangalore, for 27 participants both teachers and caregivers was funded by the DWCD and saw the active participation of the other NGOs involved in the Home Committees in Karnataka.
  • The project was one of the chief trainers in the training programme organized by the DWCD and Centre for the Child and Law (CCL), NLSIU, for the Superintendents and the probation officers in February 2003.
  • The project also contributed to the training of the members of the Child Welfare Committee (CWC) of the government of Karnataka, constituted for the first time under the provisions of the JJ Act 2000, which was held in September and Nov 2003 along with CCL and DWCD.
  • A critical component in these training programmes has been the sharing of APSA’s ideas on best practices such as challenges and success in running an open shelter and child participation in the running of homes for children as exemplified in the systems and practices at Nammane during the visit. The concept of home committees, successes and challenges were discussed so that the concept can be replicated in other districts. For few of the participants this type of an orientation was for the first time in their 20-25 years of experience. The training programmes were also useful in that the various staff members of the homes found them to be useful for to discuss bottlenecks and constraints, and discuss ways and means to overcome these. The J. J. Forum, (an informal juvenile justice forum including APSA), is following up many issues through advocacy efforts with the director and Deputy Director of the Department but the commitment from both the sides needs to be improved.
  • The state juvenile home (boys) shelters around 325 children and girls home around 180 children. The project has brought in different resources of the professionals and also to bring other NGO’s and experts together to build the capacity of the staff of the home on Counseling skills, TOT on Life skill methodologies, Sexuality, preparation of individual care plan, child participation, facilitating decision making among resident children.
  • Active Contribution in the National strategy building for Quality Institutional care (QIC).

Implementation of the New JJ Act

  • The project along with the J. J. Forum had been actively collaborating with the department to speed up the process of the implementation of the Juvenile Justice Act 2000, with special reference to the constitution of the Child Welfare Committee and Juvenile Justice Boards. As a result 20 CWC’s and 5 JJB are constituted in Karnataka.
  • It has also assisted in the conceptual and advocacy processes along with CCL for the setting up the Special Juvenile Police Units (SJPU) in partnership with the DWCD and the Police Department by having discussions with Secretary Home and NGO’s who are involved working with the police.
  • The project has also provided administrative assistance to help set up the CWC at the initial stage. APSA child line actively works with CWC by referring children from domestic and abused background.
   
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