Railway Children India commissioned a study on family reunification strategies for runaway and separated platform children along the Delhi–Bengal corridor. The corridor runs through six central Indian states: Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, and Odisha, connecting some of the country's most severe out-migration geographies to its largest urban labour markets. Children appear on platforms at both ends of this movement, and at the stations in between.
The study premise assumed reunification was the outcome of interest. What the fieldwork forced us to recognise was that reunification, as a concept, was doing too much work.
Child protection systems in India — structured primarily through the Juvenile Justice Act and POCSO, administered through Child Welfare Committees and the Integrated Child Protection Scheme — treat reunification as an event. A child is separated. A family is located. The child is returned. A case is closed. This administrative logic shapes what gets measured: the number of reunifications achieved, the time taken, whether a follow-up visit occurred within thirty days.
What the children we spoke with described was something different. Reunification for many was not a terminal state. It was a phase. Several children had returned home once, sometimes twice, before the circumstances that had driven their departure — household conflict, stepparent violence, debt-related stress, or, in multiple cases, climate shocks that had destroyed the agricultural base — reasserted themselves. The second departure was usually faster than the first, because the child now knew the corridor. They had contacts. They knew which stations had shelter workers and which did not.
Protection metrics that count reunification as an endpoint create a specific perverse incentive: the system logs the success at the moment of return and is not structured to capture what happens next. CWCs are under-resourced and have enormous caseloads; follow-up at 90 or 180 days is aspirational in most districts we visited. The result is a system that is better at measuring its own throughput than the welfare of the children it processes.
The livelihood dimension deserves separate attention. A significant proportion of the older boys (12-15) on the Delhi end of the corridor were not simply lost or distressed — they were working, in varying conditions, in roadside dhabas, construction supply chains, and domestic service arrangements that they had found through station-based social networks. Some had remitted money home. Some were supporting younger siblings who had followed them. The moral and legal clarity of the child protection framework — these children should not be here, they should be in school — sat in some tension with the economic reality their families were navigating.
This is not an argument against reunification. It is an observation about what reunification alone cannot resolve. A return home to a household with no livelihood base and an unresolved conflict is a different kind of reunification than a return supported by economic stabilisation and family counselling. The study's recommendation, which Railway Children has incorporated into their programme design, was to treat reunification as a process rather than an event: a series of contacts over at least six months, with attention to the household conditions that precipitated departure.
The methodology combined semi-structured interviews with children and caregivers, key informant interviews with CWC members, station platform workers, and NGO outreach staff, and secondary analysis of ICPS administrative data from the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights. District-level migration data from the 2011 Census migration tables and CMIE Household Survey data on out-migration by state were used to contextualise the sending geographies.
NCPCR's Bal Swaraj portal and Railway Children's own annual data on platform child contacts provided administrative reference points.