25 Million Orphaned Children Lie Behind India’s Booming Success

Oct. 28, 2008 - PRLog -- Amidst 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. The perpetrator is poverty, and its foot soldiers are AIDS, malaria, gender and caste discrimination, unclean water, illiteracy, and malnutrition. While there may be no Adolf Hitler or Idi Amin behind it, make no mistake – it is a holocaust all the same.

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-old boy named Yesu, living with his grandmother after his parents died of AIDS in Andhra Pradesh, the epicenter of the epidemic. Yesu went to work each day, foregoing his childhood to take care of his younger brother who bore the legacy of this senseless disease’s rampage across India – the nine-year-old orphan was HIV-positive. Across the country near Delhi another former child laborer, Om Prakash, became an activist for destitute and vulnerable children, campaigning against trafficking and discrimination. In 2006 this extraordinary teenager was honored with the world’s most prestigious award for children – the International Children’s Peace Prize from the Nobel Prize Laureates.

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.

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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.