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Eleven-year-old Sangita Singh is not your average Indian school child.
She already has a reputation for making politicians nervous.
For the past two years, the budding journalist
has used the power of her pencil
to shed light on the sorrows and struggles
of the South Delhi slum
she calls home.
This week's headline:
"Trash Turns Toxic in the Summer Heat."
I thought about this topic
because I see it all around me.
There are flies and mosquitoes all around,
which I've noticed can
cause fever and malaria.
Sangita is one of several young
reporters from Sangam Vihar,
a shanty town composed of
100,000 migrant squatters.
Each week, slum children
as young as 5 gather to write
for Udayachal, a youth-run quarterly newspaper,
about issues affecting them,
from bad drinking water to child marriage.
Their mentors:
the original crop of young journalists
who started the paper five years ago.
"Whatever you can answer, OK?"
The first edition was no more
than handwritten sheets slapped onto a local bus stop.
Now, with training from two NGOS, Kalyanam and Gandhi Smriti,
slum kids put out a digitally
mastered four-page news sheet.
Their daily assignment:
open their eyes and walk outside.
As you can see there is garbage all around.
There are flies all over the place
and it stinks so much that I can't stand here for long.
I feel nauseous already.
It's the really small kids
who suffer the most
and fall ill easily because of this.
NGO reports indicate 20 percent of the so called "rag pickers"
in Sangita's slum
don't live to see their fifth birthday.
Early on, Sangita was tasked with
raising her younger brother -- also a young journalist --
and sister while her mother worked long hours as a seamstress.
She tackles each story with their well-being on her mind.
It's so dirty out here that anyone can fall ill
who knows, but maybe one day I or my family might fall ill.
My brother or sister might get sick.
Anyone can get sick.
Her first interview is with a 22-year-old migrant,
Dhuli Sarkar, whose 2-year-old son, Suman,
is almost always sick.
Sangita suspects the toxic trash is the culprit.
"What problems do you face?"
"I left my family, my parents.
I don't have money and my husband's family is always at work.
We don't have fish or rice to eat.
It's smelly and there's no water."
"Don't cry. Crying won't solve anything."
Nonprofit groups have been trying to clean up the slum,
but most residents admit they don't listen to outsiders.
But, says R.B. Prashant, Director of
the community group Kalyanam, which supports the paper,
slum residents have been receptive to the children.
When they see the articles written of their own communities,
with the problems, by their own
children, and they go for that national newsletter
and they never see any information about their own community
even though a lot of problems are faced by them.
So they are very much happy
and they also see the solution, also.
Two years ago, Sangita was just
another kid playing in the dirt.
Until, says Udayachal Organizer Mr. Prashant,
she was inspired by the paper's ability to make
local cops take action
after her neighbor was killed
in a fight over gambling debt.
Police reacted very fast by seeing this, that it has come
in the community newsletter and it was written by the children.
Otherwise police always take
the money and they don't take any actions.
Armed with evidence that her work matters,
Sangita approaches a 12-year-old
who has been left to care for her infant sibling.
"My mother came at 1 p.m., fed the baby and returned to work."
In this 5-month-old, Sangita has found inspiration
for her next story topic:
child malnutrition.
As the slum population grows,
Sangita says it is her job
to get people to wake up to the fact
that their living conditions are not normal.
We'll go through the slum area again
and when we see that people
are living in a much cleaner environment,
and the kids have cleaner clothes to wear,
and that their mothers can feed them enough food,
then I will know yes, there is a change.
Sangita's work has already inspired community leaders
to launch nutrition and hygiene workshops for new mothers.
For Sangita,
that is only the beginning.
When I grow up
I want to serve the poor;
open a hospital for the poor.
I want to do a lot so that even the poor feel important.
Such aspirations make it
easy to forget this star journalist is not even a teenager.
That is, until you catch a glimpse of her unwinding
after a hard day's work.