Mumbai is a vast and vibrant city, whose destitute underbelly was made famous by Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire. The plight of Mumbai’s slum children is not a celluloid myth. As the need for development in a city of 22 million increases, so does the demand for migrant workers and construction laborers. As people pour into the city for such transient work, makeshift dwellings emerge around construction sites, only to be torn down and rebuilt elsewhere after the work ends. The children of these workers have a fairly rootless existence, using rubble-strewn construction sites as their homes and playgrounds. They are invisible to the local government and have little access to healthcare and education.
In 1969 Meera Mahadevan founded Mobile Crèches in Delhi with the belief that every child has rights to a secure environment, education and health services. Three decades later, the organization has reached out to half a million children on construction sites in Mumbai alone. The NGO has three separate faces: Mobile Crèches (Delhi), Mumbai Mobile Crèches (MMC) and Tara Mobile Crèches (Pune), each of which has multiple centers for early childhood development.
Devika Mahadevan is the current CEO of the organization. She is continuing her grandmother’s efforts in Mumbai, where Mobile Crèches has 22 MMC centers and 120 teachers. It relies on support from builders and developers, and petitions the local government to include the children in their mandate. “While we have grown in strength and numbers, the root problem hasn’t changed. Government policies have not changed. Maharashtra [the state where MMC is based] only ratified the Construction Worker Act of 1996 [providing health insurance to workers] last year- which is yet to be implemented. It is ironic – the people constructing the future of our cities have no future to speak of,” Mahadevan says.
