The Orphan Industry
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THE ORPHAN INDUSTRY
Charity is their business. And business is good. Riyaz Wanireports on the
orphanage racket in the Kashmir Valley
Photos: Faisal Khan
AT LAST count, the Kashmir Valley had 2.14 lakh orphans. That disturbing
statistic is proving to be a boon for those running orphanages, which are
hellholes for the children but a money-making machine for one-man charity
outfits. Orphanages are a 120 crore business, according to a conservative
estimate, and a bulk of that is unregulated.
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Shaista was just one year old when her father, a militant, was shot dead by
security forces in 2009. Her mother Habla Begum, who already had a three-
year-old daughter, found it difficult to raise both children. So, the Bandipora
resident sent Shaista to an orphanage in Srinagar, 54 km away.
Now, Shaista lives at Ansar-ul- Masakeen, a decrepit two-room orphanage at
Kanipora, a low-income neighbourhood on the outskirts of Srinagar. Nearly a
dozen girls, the eldest of them aged 12, live in a 17ftx15ft hall. The walls are
plastered with mud. In winter, the girls spend their entire time in the hall,
sleeping, studying and playing under the supervision of two women who
cook and serve for them.
Each girl has a tragic story to tell fathers either shot dead or missing,
survived by homeless, poverty-stricken mothers and siblings. Sabreena,
Safeena, Afroza, Rukhsana and Zareefa have all come from families reeling
in abject poverty brought upon them by the prevailing conflict.
Children aged between 3 and 10 are being brought up in hundreds of
orphanages across the Valley. Most of them are like Ansar-ul-Masakeen,
which is working independently of any government monitoring or control.
The city of Srinagar itself has at least 21 such institutions.
Located at Nowgam in Srinagar is the Al Falah Yateem Trust, another
unregistered orphanage, where 16 boys reside in two halls with an adjacent
kitchen on the second storey of a derelict building. Mudasir Ahmad was
brought to the orphanage from Kulgam town in south Kashmir when he was
five. His mother married again after his father, a militant, was killed in a
gunbattle with the security forces. Unable to take care of him, his
grandparents brought him to the orphanage. I want to go back to my
mother. I miss her, says Mudasir. He often suffers from stomach cramps for
which he is occasionally treated at Srinagars Shri Maharaja Hari Singh
Hospital.
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A similar orphanage in downtown Srinagar is run by the Alamdar Yateem
Trust, which is housed in an old decrepit building that belongs to Prem Nath
Gaasi, a Kashmiri Pandit. The trust looks after around 15 children, most of
whom hail from remote areas of north and south Kashmir.
Only 27 orphanages are registered with the Jammu & Kashmir Social Welfare
Department. According to officials, the department directly runs 17
orphanages 11 Bal Niketans and six Nari Niketans where it provides
lodging, boarding and education to the homeless children.
The government has mandated us to register private orphanages and
monitor their functioning. But we only register those that have adequate
facilities. Only they become eligible for our grants, says Social Welfare
Director Hilal Ahmad.
According to Save The Children, an NGO, there are many orphanages that
operate outside government control. As per its 2009 study, the NGO
estimates the number of orphans in Kashmir at 2.14 lakh, with only 20,000
finding shelter in orphanages. More than half of them are in the 7-16 age
group. The number is confirmed by a survey conducted by the Kashmir
Universitys sociology department, which pegs the number of widows at
32,000. However, a 2007-08 survey conducted by the state government has
put the figure at 26,000, a number that civil society groups contest.
Qurat-ul-Ain Masoodi, who follows the work of orphanages, says most of
them operate from one- or two-room hovels. In some cases, people just put
up a signboard of an orphanage in front of a shop and collect funds in its
name, an indication that the so-called orphan care is pursued as a business,
says Masoodi, who runs Asha, an NGO. There are a few trusts that are doing
good work but many have forayed into the business just to mint money.
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A case in point is Al Noor, a purported orphanage at Hamdania Colony in
Srinagar, which is run from a room on the second storey of a shopping
complex. The room remains locked. But Al Noor chairman Shabir Ahmad
Rather says he offers financial help to the families of 42 orphans. We pay
for their school fees and books, he says. Around 80 percent of the orphans
are affected by the militancy.
After Masoodi filed a complaint with the State Human Rights Commission
(SHRC) last year, the government shut down Shah-i-Jeelan, an orphanage in
downtown Srinagar. In her complaint, Masoodi had chronicled the abuse
faced by the children at the hands of the management. SHRC officials
investigated and verified the incidents. The SHRC ordered the Social Welfaredirector to seal the orphanage and rehabilitate the children in the
departments charitable institutions. The commission also directed the
government to survey all the unregistered orphanages in the Valley.
Even 10 months after the order, the government has little to show by way
of any data, says Masoodi, who is writing a book on the state of the Valleys
orphanages. What is more, Shah-i-Jeelan has reopened at a different
location.
Community donations are the most visible source of orphanage funding. A
few long-running, well-established institutions are financed by Kashmiris
living abroad or international NGOs. Baitul Hilal is one such institution
located at Jawahar Nagar in Srinagar. The orphanage has better
infrastructure and houses around 50 children who are generally taught in
private schools.
There are other Srinagar-based orphanages like Yateem Khana and Yateem
Trust, the last of which has been in operation for the past 41 years. They are
among the few charitable institutions that have adequate infrastructure. On
their websites, they appeal for generous public donations.
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Yateem Trust patron Zahoor Ahmad Tak admits that the charity scene is
getting murky in the Valley. The situation is rife with fake trusts and NGOs.
They operate in a policy vacuum on the rehabilitation of orphans and
widows, says Tak, who runs a chain of orphanages.
Gimme shelter There are more than 2 lakh orphans in the Kashmir Valley,
out of which around 20,000 are housed in orphanages
According to experts, what is compounding the situation is that the children
at unregistered orphanages receive not only little personal attention but also
poor education. They are sent to local government schools that rank lowest
on academic performance and are taught the Quran and Hadith at the
orphanages.
A substantial number of orphans have also been sent by their families to
madrasas that provide free lodging and boarding and impart exclusively
religious education. We have studied that around 80 percent of the orphans
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drop out of school after their matriculation. That is when they are sent back
to their families, reveals Tak.
THE TREND of setting up orphanages began in Kashmir in the mid-1990s,
five years into the armed separatist campaign. This is when orphanages
sprouted across the Valley to cater to the rising number of orphans as a
result of the killings. Now in the 24th year of violence, the first generation of
orphans has already left the orphanages.
But there is no data on what happened to them. We dont know whether the
orphanage upbringing made any redeeming difference to their lives, says
clinical psychologist Dr Muzaffar Khan. He did a psychoanalytic study of
inmates at Shehjar, an orphanage on the outskirts of Srinagar and found that
they had developed serious psychological issues. These children have seen
the worst of Kashmirs turbulence, says Dr Khan. They represent the pain
of Kashmir. That is why they harbour a lot of anger towards society, which
we need to deal with empathetically.
In an exercise conducted by Masoodi where orphanage inmates were
persuaded to write about their experiences, some of them revealed the
shades of this anger. Imran Amin Naik, 16, of Kokernag town in south
Kashmir, wrote about how his father was shot dead by the army when they
discovered that a militant was holed up in their house. My father didnt
know that the militant was there. He was outside. But the army still killed
him, he wrote. Similarly, Masarat Rasool, 16, of Budgam town, talks about
the killing of his father Ghulam Rasool Rather, a police constable, by
militants. My father passed away in 2002. He was escorting prisoners when
the militants attacked the vehicle and killed him.
The indiscriminate growth of orphanages in the Valley is making many
people uneasy. Dr Rauf Malik, who helped set up Baitul Hilal orphanage in
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2000 and subsequently grew disillusioned with the idea, says establishing an
orphanage was easier in the Valley than building a school.
The Juvenile Justice Act has no clause on orphanages. Orphanages are
registered under the Societies Registration Act, 1961, under which simple
registration certificates are obtained, says Dr Malik, who now runs Koshish,
a child rights NGO funded by Child Rights & You, a non-profit. But that never
entitles people to run these institutions. No Act is in place to govern the
functioning of these institutions and there is no legal authority as well.
Dr Malik thinks a large number of unregistered orphanages are a source of
livelihood for their owners. There are orphanages that house 20 children but
they recruit a staff of 6-7 people, most of them their kith and kin. And even
in some large organisations in the Valley, it is a big bureaucratic world that
has taken over, says Dr Malik who filed a PIL in the J&K High Court in 2006
to stay the NGOs from taking children from the Valley to orphanages outside
the state. We could have spent less and made a more redeeming difference
to the lot of orphans if we financed their education and welfare in their own
homes.
But despite the scale of tragedy and its fallout on a large section of the
population, orphans live in a sterile, insulated world. Their condition gets
little government attention and never becomes a subject of political
discourse, both in the mainstream and separatist quarters. Separatists, who
otherwise call themselves custodians of the cause of the people who laid
down their lives in the past two decades, have generally been indifferent to
the welfare of their children and widows.
However, some Hurriyat leaders claim that the government stonewalls their
bid to offer help. In the 1990s, we made a serious effort to institutionalise
the distribution of relief but the government aborted it, says Hurriyat (G)
spokesman Ayaz Akber, adding that the separatists are now keeping a
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deliberate distance from the orphanages fearing that their attention will
politicise the ongoing humanitarian effort.
On the other hand, NGOs wrestle hard to keep ideological distance in the
Valleys strict political binary and stay focussed on the job. Our job is to
selflessly help the orphans and widows, says Tak. And the only way it can
be done honestly is by ridding ourselves of all political and ideological
motivations and commitments.
(Published in Tehelka Magazine, Volume 10 Issue 18, Dated 4 May 2013)
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