Voices of Change – How a Group of Young Boys & Girls Made a Meaningful Impact to RCI’s School Admission Campaign

It was a regular evening in Tulsi Nagar, Delhi. Parents had returned home from a tiring day at work. While some children were unzipping their bags to revisit their homework, some others were chasing each other down the winding by lanes of the basti. This humdrum of yet another evening was broken by high-pitched voices of a group of young girls and boys, shouting slogans that the community members had never heard before.

“Mummy, papa humein padhoa, school mein chalke naam likhao!”

“Deep se deep jalate chalo, shikshit Bharat banate chalo.”

This motley group of young children were part of a children’s group, active at the community’s Child Activity Center (CAC). Here the group would gather every day, do their homework together, play together, learn a bunch of new skills with activities, and then once a month gather for a meeting of meaningful discourse and solution finding.

In their last meeting, the group, along with members of RCI’s community outreach team, discussed the upcoming school admission season. The discussion revealed that this year’s admission season had many potential takers within the community in the form of out-of-school and dropped-out children. Some like nine-year-old Vikas (name changed) had to drop out of school owing to a long break caused by his illness, while some others like 11-year-old Geetika (name changed) had been intending to rejoin school but couldn’t owing to her missing birth certificate.

Myriad obstacles such as Vikas’ recovery break and Geetika’s missing birth certificate stood in the way of several children within the community who were aching to resume/join school but could not.

When discussing how fruitful the upcoming admission season could be for their friends like Vikas and Geetika, this group realized yet another towering obstacle, unawareness about admission season among parents!

From Railway Children India’s community notes gathered after routine home visits, it was clear that parents of many children were simply unaware about the soon-to-begin admission process in schools. When devising an effective plan of action that would deliver awareness about the season to every household of the basti, one girl chirped “Let’s do a rally like RCI’s Bhaiyya does.”

“Yes, Let’s gather microphones and some of our other friends, write down a bunch of impactful slogans that will draw attention to our campaign and hit the gullies,” another of her peers chimed.

This is how an active children’s group, blossoming in the safety of the community’s CAC, contributed to RCI’s school enrollment campaign with an ingenious idea. And off they hit the narrow by lanes of the community with their mighty voices and urgent call to action!

Planned and executed by an impassioned group of 13 boys and 15 girls, the rally received curious looks and a barrage of questions. RCI’s team of outreach members duly answered all their queries with workable solutions and step-by-step guides. The rally’s success reflected in five children from Tulsi Nagar being enrolled in public schools for the academic year 2024-2025.