A children's newspaper in India is employing underprivileged kids to report on the COVID-19 crisis
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- The Indian newspaper Balaknama, or "children's journal," pays nearly 90 reporters — all kids — to report on the COVID-19 health crisis and other issues.
- The children all come from the slums or streets of Delhi, and the newspaper is helping to teach them skills to lift them out of poverty.
- During the pandemic, millions of children around the world have dropped out of school and been forced into child labor.
For the 18 million children who live on the streets of Delhi, India, and in slums across the country, opportunities for success are hard to come by.
But a nonprofit called Chetna has been helping children out of poverty through the power of journalism.
In 2002, Chetna launched Balaknama, a newspaper produced by underprivileged kids that reports on the challenges they face in everyday life. The name means "children's journal" in Hindi.
Shanno, the senior editor of the monthly publication, says it now has a network of over 90 reporters, all children.
"These children live amongst us, on the streets. They work at restaurants and factories or they beg or sell recyclables," Shanno said. "And these kids are very social, street-smart, and natural leaders."
October's editorial meeting was held in a park to promote social distancing — the first in-person meeting the team held in six months because of coronavirus health precautions.
Some of Balaknama's reporters are illiterate and collect news on the ground. Those who are literate, like 18-year old Jyoti, then write up the stories.
"Before this I used to work in the streets. I used to sort out trash and beg on the streets for money," Jyoti said. "I've never been to school, but I educate myself. I have books from the 10th-grade level."
"In my experience, a guy who has a stall selling water, his kid will also end up in the same job because he doesn't have the resources to get an education," 17-year-old reporter Deepak said. "So I distribute the paper to them so they can show it to their children and say, 'Look, kids like you have done so well for themselves.'"
Balaknama pays reporters a stipend of about 5,000 rupees, or $65 dollars a month, to cover food, phone, and transportation costs. But the real reward for the kids is seeing their names in print.
Balaknama moved online when India went under lockdown in March. The virus has killed nearly 130,000 people in India, the third highest death toll in the world.
"Now because of the coronavirus, when kids are begging on the streets, they are being told, 'You must have the virus and we will catch it too, so stay away,'" Shanno said. "People push the kids around and swear at them. So these are the kind of issues we wrote about."
And Shanno added that many of them are being pressured to work other jobs amid the pandemic.
"They told us about how more kids are being forced to work, how they are quitting their education, and how some kids who never worked are now begging on the streets," she said. "It was very sad for us to learn that these children who we had worked so hard to send to school were now working because of COVID-19.
In fact, the UN estimates that 24 million children will drop out of school worldwide due to the pandemic. Many of them will be forced to take up jobs, raising concerns of a spike in child labor. Shanno herself is no stranger to that — she said she remembers working at a clothing factory as a child, working around the clock for $4 or $5 a week. Now she's getting a degree in social work.
"I'm the only girl in my family who is well-educated and has created an identity for herself," she said. "And my mom feels proud, too."
Shanno hopes that Balaknama can also change the lives of other kids — one story at a time.