Ms. Bondana Dutta Director - North & East, CRY

CRY – Child Relief and You (www.cry.org) is a premier Indian child rights organisation working for basic rights of survival, protection and healthy development of all children in the society, in a word, ‘to childhood’.  Started in 1979, CRY has immensely partnered in large number of child development projects. Over the past 26 years, CRY has learned that ensuring child rights in a sustainable manner is possible only when grassroots action is combined with community empowerment, active citizenship and advocacy.

What led to the foundation of CRY?
With a burning passion to serve deprived children of the society Mr. Rippan Kapur started CRY with some of his like-minded friends and raised a small corpus of Rs. 50/-. Although Rippan passed away in the year 1994, his dreams are kept alive through various activities of CRY.

What is the extent of influence for CRY in terms of its social and geographical reach?
CRY started its operation from Mumbai, followed by branch offices in Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai and Kolkata. Currently, our work area spans over as many as 17 Indian states. Till now, CRY has partnered in over 300 child development projects, impacting approximately 1.37 million children across 2500 communities. At present, CRY has nearly 0.1 million individuals and organisational partners supporting to carry out our programmes.

What primary ‘mechanisms’ does CRY employ in its effort to address child issues?
In ensuring child rights, CRY partners with various NGOs, individuals, corporates and the government. We have been the prime mover in forming state-level networks of organisations working for children’s rights in Maharashtra, Orissa, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Delhi and Tamil Nadu. We are also part of many state and national issue-based alliances like the National Alliance for the Fundamental Right to Education (NAFRE), Campaign Against Child Labour (CACL), End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism (ECPAT) and Donor Agency Network (DAN).

What are the major achievements of CRY in advocating for child centric interventions in government policies?
One of the landmark successes in our advocacy efforts is in partnering with NAFRE. For this, we mobilised all the state alliances and during the Parliament session that discussed the ‘Education Bill’, we led a rally of about 50,000 people from different states of India in demand for right to education for all children. During 2004 general elections which coincided with CRY’s 25th year commemoration, we initiated a campaign to evaluate political parties based on their commitment to ensure the rights of children in the country. We also lobbied for inclusion of child rights in their pre-election manifestos by sharing a ‘CRY Charter of Demands for Children’. Apart from these, we are consultants to the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment regarding juvenile homes in 6 states of India. In future, we will be collaborating with the government on Member of Parliament sensitisation programmes and building of an MP’s forum on child rights. We also plan to work with various levels of government to promote a comprehensive child rights Act/Law and the formation of a strong Child Rights Commission.

What is the level of preparedness of our country for achieving MDG 4 (reduce child mortality) and how does CRY address MDGs through its overall agenda?
Efforts of various child rights organisations like CRY are continuing and we are relentlessly working towards these goals. Some more initiatives are expected from Central and State Governments.

How CRY is utilising ICT in their programmes?
CRY’s working area being spread out into very interior places, we cannot use ICT at all locations. Our IT applications are primarily restricted only to urban and semi-urban projects. However, we are extensively using our website to disseminate information regarding child rights.

How CRY is working towards mobilising general public support for child relief?
CRY’s general experience shows that people are very much concerned about children’s issues and look on CRY to channelise their passion into positive action. As part of CRY’s 25th year commemoration, we initiated a freedom movement for India’s children where we urged people to sign ‘CRY Free a Child Chakris’ as a statement of their support for child rights. This campaign enlisted support from almost half a million people, making the Chakri a symbol of freedom for India’s children.

What is the future plan of CRY towards strengthening its campaigns and programmes?
CRY’s long-term endeavour is to include a ‘rights’ mode besides the ‘immediate relief’ mode. For this, CRY is planning to get increasingly involved with advocacy issues and developing alliances and networking with more number of civil society organisations. Moreover, our youth and volunteer groups are working towards developing ‘Citizen Action Groups’ in different localities in order to address and work specifically for child rights in their local areas.