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Follow on Google News | 25 Million Orphaned Children Lie Behind India’s Booming SuccessAmidst India’s shimmering new success and growing prosperity, there is a hidden India in which an entire generation of children is growing up parentless. This holocaust is waging a silent war against millions of Indian children.
By: Shelley Seale In my journeys over the last three years into the orphanages, slums, clinics and streets of India I have met and become immersed in the lives of dozens of these invisible children, whose hope and resilience showed me the beautiful side of India even in the most difficult places. They are everywhere. Some scrounge through trash for newspapers, rags or anything they can sell at traffic intersections. Others, often as young as two or three years old, beg. India has the largest population of child laborers in the world – estimated at up to 100 million – and is home to the most AIDS orphans of any country, at over two million. Many of these children are homeless, extremely vulnerable to being trafficked into child labor if they’re lucky, brothels if they’re not. Children like Sahiful, who was rescued at age six from the backbreaking agricultural labor he had been forced into and taken to live at a boys’ home, where he was allowed to play for the first time in his life. By the age of thirteen, Sahiful had become an international award-winning filmmaker. Or a twelve-year- These children live on the precipice of disaster every day, and are largely overlooked by the world. Human rights and the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child demands that raise awareness of this shocking truth and step in to uphold the rights of millions of Indian children. # # # Shelley Seale's work has appeared in dozens of magazines, newspapers and journals. Her areas of writing specialty include travel and India. She has completed a book about the 25 million children growing up without parents in India and the issues facing them, such as AIDS, poverty, trafficking, child labor, the sex trade and more. You can read more about this topic at http://weightofsilence.wordpress.com. End
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