Two Chennai students, A.C. Rajkamal, 23, and R. Karthik, 22, have achieved what institutions and NGOs often find hard to accomplish.
The two masters degree students of Vivekananda College have reunited 55 lost children with their families in the last one year. All by themselves.
The young men, during their month-long internship at Government Boys’ Home in Royapuram in 2010, were moved by the fact that many children were stranded in Chennai and wanted to get back to their homes in distant places.
Since Kamal could speak Telugu, Tamil and English and his friend Karthik was fluent in Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam and Tamil, they built a rapport with children from all states.
As some of the kids could recollect mobile numbers of their parents or relatives, Kamal and Karthik would ring up the parents and alert them about their children in the government home, which helped them reunite.
Recently, 14 child workers from Bihar, who were ditched by their employer at Chennai Central Railway Station, were sent back home within two weeks. In another instance, a Nepali teenager was reunited with his family simply through a phone call. However, it’s always not so easy.
Sometimes they have nothing to go by except for a few landmarks that the kids remember.
"Appu, a seven-year old beggar, was rescued from a city temple. We gathered details about his locality and visited many slums in Chennai’s western suburbs. With maps and landmarks mentioned by him, we found his house in Tiruverkadu and reunited him with his family who were looking for him for two months,” they said.
Though their internship is over, they still receive calls from separated kids at the government home.
“We have to reunite many more kids,” says the duo with confidence.
