India’s Slumdog Press (Dateline,13 June 9.30 pm on SBS)

Slum-2 Final
Photo: SBS

By SAT News Desk

Delhi’s street kids are doing an extraordinary thing – bringing out their own newspaper ‘Balaknama’ (Voice of the Children) where their own stories are the headlines. Each of these invisible children have a story which never makes it to the mainstream Press. From the lanes of Old Delhi, this media experiment is touching stories that explain their own lives.

Dateline reporter travels to India to meet the extraordinary young reporters behind Balaknama – including 17-year-old editor Shambu and 16-year-old senior reporter Jyoti – as they hunt for stories and work to change the lives of fellow street kids.

With views of Old Delhi’s crowded streets amidst the urban chaos ‘Balaknama’s biggest scoop has been the exposure of cops forcing street kids to pick up suicide victims from train tracks. There is, in fact, much more.

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About 2 million kids live on streets in India often nicknamed the ‘invisible children’. Literacy rates have been rising in India increasing the hunger for news and the growth of print media, declining in other countries.

This 23 minutes Dateline story (Tuesday 13 June 9.30 pm on SBS) raises questions of poverty and squalor in a country claiming to be one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Will a newspaper bring any change to the desperate and unfortunate lives of these street children?

Join Dateline reporter Calliste Weitenberg on Dateline this Tuesday for this uplifting and inspiring story about how the poorest kids in India are changing their own destiny and changing India in the process.

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Neeraj Nanda

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