"Didi, can you come? There's been a fight at the station."
"Didi, can you help? The police have battered Raju."
And a CHILDLINE volunteer would get up and rush out to
where a street child was waiting. On one of those dashes across the sleeping
city of Mumbai , an idea was born.
What street children in Mumbai needed was a helpline, their own
helpline.
In 1996, Mumbai launched CHILDLINE,
the country's first toll-free tele-helpline for street children in
distress. It has responded a total of 15, 883, 547 calls from inception till March 2009 and operates in 83 cities/districts in 22 States and 3 Union Territories, through its network of 196 partner organisations across India.
