All paint and pain for Hyderabad street children

Hyderabad: One of India’s biggest festivals, just concluded but Hyderabad’s children in paint, remain a haunting reminder of how our priorities are often wrong. A video of these children begging for alms was uploaded by a city youngster and now there’s a call for action, but there hasn’t been any success.

“I personally called at least seven NGOs, but they all refused to help. They claim they had tried but the problem is once the children are claimed by their parents, they are put back into this job,” says Deven Baheti, who uploaded the video he shot on Saturday. The clip is captioned, “forced by parents ignored by the audience”.

“A family friend and I tried to use a bit of influence. But that too was useless, as the children were just asked to move to a different location. There is no real help,” says Baheti.

In his original post, he points to an irony: “while the ladus are auctioned for lakhs, these kids begged for coins just coins. The policemen at the scene said the kids “were not their department”.