A multitude of children fleeing the poverty of rural villages and often from abuse and violence, use the railways to try to reach the cities, in the illusion of finding salvation. As a result, thousands of children who come to the stations with a desire for adventure and a better life end up living on tracks and platforms, exposed to drugs and brutality. The station is a chaotic place, perfect for people who intend to take advantage of lonely, desperate and vulnerable children; many of them thus end up taking refuge in the cheapest and most harmful drugs. A crowd of beggar children is so common in India that it is almost ignored by travellers: they are part of the "scenario" of a station. They become almost invisible.

The aim of the project is to identify children in danger before traffickers and exploiters abuse them and to save them by offering them a future. Shelters are created at the stations where hundreds of children, intercepted by social workers on the platforms and in trains, can find shelter. They have access to a meal, basic hygiene and emergency medical careif needed. Above all, they have access to support and discussion with specifically trained staff, who try to reconstruct their origins, to understand if and why the family is not taking care of them, to direct them towards education and to take charge of their future.The priority is always to reunite children with their family of origin: for this reason, a substantial part of the work is carried out in the community and aimed at "educating" families (and, if present, the "group of wise men") on the rights fundamentals of childhood, on the prohibition of child labor, on the damage caused by early marriages, on the importance of school, etc.

There are many success stories among the children saved in our shelters and ended with the reunion with those families from which they usually moved away even at 2 or 3 years of age, to become shoe cleaners, drug addicts and small-time prostitutes.

An important component of this success is represented by the collaborative relationship that is built, with great commitment on the part of our operators, with the various subjects who have an impact on the context of the stations: the railway police, street vendors, whoever title works on the tracks. These synergies allow us to build an information and monitoring network to protect children,who often become part of it, transforming themselves into real assistants of our social workers. In fact, they themselves report anomalous or dangerous situations, especially in defense of other children.