Child Participation: From Radical Principle to Routine Activity in India’s Largest Child Rights Scheme

Child participation, mandating that children should be able to impact the laws,
policies, and programmes that affect them, is a core child rights principle. However, if children’s ideas should be taken seriously, it requires a radically open-minded and adaptable attitude of the adults whose responsibility it is to implement these laws, policies, and programmes. Such an attitude is difficult to “mainstream” throughout large bureaucracies, and child participation, as a result, often ends up being a box to tick for busy case workers. This clash between the intention and practice of child participation was evident in my ethnographic study of CHILDLINE India Foundation, India’s national child helpline that began as an NGO initiative and now is a national government programme. I illustrate how the child helpline was developed in close collaboration with Mumbai’s Street children in the 1990s, incubating a credo of “listening to children,” but as it was spread to hundreds of NGOs and government offices throughout India as a national programme, “child participation,” for some NGOs, became one of many values that were ordered from the top, and not always internalised on the ground. I discuss this inherent difficulty of “mainstreaming” child participation in large-scale child rights programmes through the theoretical lens of “critical child rights studies” which focuses on the contextual, interdisciplinary, and critical study of children’s rights. Looking critically and contextually at the implementation of child participation of CHILDLINE and the Indian bureaucracy, I show that this was a space where “NGO values” of rights and participation clashed with the paper-thick Indian bureaucracy demanding documentation and paper. The result was that on-the-ground case workers were stuck between demands of “participation” from their NGO leaders, demands of documentation by the local state bureaucracy and donor NGOs alike, and their actual work of manning the helpline and dealing with children in need of care and protection – leaving little time for child participation, and little power to incorporate children’s views into their practice.