CHILD FRIENDLY CITY

How to improve the quality of life in developing countries? This question might have haunted many of us. How we can have a safe and healthy environment for our kids and for ourselves. In this blog post, I will be discussing one such way to improve our lives. 

To start with let's start by answering the question. We can have improved quality of life by having CHILD-FRIENDLY CITIES. 

YES having a child-friendly city can greatly improve our lifestyle or our city's lifestyle altogether. Now, this is only possible if, each child feels safe and secure in the city premises. The feeling of oneness. The feeling of togetherness. Do you like it when we see some kids going to school with bags and others going to pick garbage as ragpickers? Roads, that are filled with the kids begging on every other signal, should be filled with children who are going to educational institutions for learning how to develop the country and how to live a better life.

Won't that will bring a healthy life to us.

Have you ever wondered why children fall prey to bad or ill-habits? The answer is they visualize differences. They see different people, they see children of their ages going for beggary and being beaten up at different eateries. They witness all these scenarios which lead to a very bad impression on their minds.


Now, their ill habits make them do all things that harm their health and the environment. To prevent this we need to take some good steps towards saving humanity.
Let's start with finding why we see children begging?

Have we ever wondered what are the causes and effects of beggary? The majority of us might think of answers like drugs, mafia, and poverty. Believe me, these reasons constitute around 20 percent of all the reasons behind beggary.

According to beggars in India statistics, there are 4 lakhs beggars. Out of which 3 lakhs are child beggars and are forced to beg. The major reason comes out to be a habit. Yes, they are habitual of begging. They find it easy to make money in this way. Even if a family can afford to send their kids to school, they won't do that. Children refuse to go to schools because they enjoy making money on roads. The money they get from begging is either used for buying drugs for themselves or in some other wrong deeds.

Begging has many bad effects on the child. Some of the obvious ones are like children grow beyond their ages and lose their innocence. They fall back in bad criminal activities which only leads to an increase in the number of crimes in a city and country overall.

Now, if we are talking about crime. Let me tell you that begging is a crime in India, according to one of the judicial laws which have already been passed by the government but it lacks its proper implementation. Now, let's discuss how to stop begging in India. A very nice initiative has been taken by Har Hath Kalam India Association in Patiala. It's an NPO (a non-profit organization). It's working towards eradicating child begging bringing in improved education systems and providing access to these underprivileged kids. It's founder Mr. Harsh Kothari is a young endeavoring entrepreneur who passed out bachelors from Thapar Institute of engineering and technology in 2015 batch. He, firmly believes that the idea of a child-friendly city should be advanced to many more cities.

So, now we know how to deal beggars in India? Stop giving alms to these kids. These kids need something else. They need someone to make them visualize the wider picture. According to the detailed survey from Har Haath Kalam. These kids lack non-cognitive skills. This organization is working on eradication of child begging by bringing behavioral changes in these kids and their community.

Now the question arises how we can help in having a child-friendly city. We can get connected with this NGO and can help it grow in our cities. We can sponsor them either. They have a very unique way to deal with their sponsors. They don't ask them money in the bulk instead they ask them to pay 100 rupees per month regularly. This helps them with their proper functioning and also 100 rupees per month is quite a manageable thing. This is known as their 100 rupees campaign. They also have some other ways like they have their 1 rupee campaign for schools. Every kid pays 1 rupee to Har Hath Kalam which they collect from the school at the last of every month. 

WELL DONE to this organization which is trying hard to improve the quality of life. Until now they have changed more than 150 lives. I hope more children to join the list.