The Delhi women and child development department has drafted guidelines for Children in Street Situations, or CiSS, seeking to replace episodic rescue drives with a coordinated system of identification, protection, rehabilitation and reintegration. The proposal comes after consultations involving more than 150 representatives from government departments, Delhi Police, non-government organisations, academia and civil society.
The draft is significant not simply because it proposes new procedures for children seen begging, rag-picking or selling goods at traffic signals. It attempts to define who these children are, distinguish between different forms of street exposure and assign responsibilities across institutions. Its central challenge is administrative: Delhi must respond to children whose lives often sit at the intersection of poverty, migration, family distress, homelessness, substance use, exploitation and weak access to public services.
The department has framed the guidelines around six linked functions: identification, rescue, protection, rehabilitation, restoration and reintegration. WCD secretary Dr Rashmi Singh said the department was committed to protecting children from begging and exploitation while ensuring safety, dignity, education and rehabilitation. SM Ali, deputy director of the child protection and development unit, described the proposed framework as a coordinated, child-centric mechanism with clear roles for stakeholders.
That coordination is necessary because the category of a child in a street situation is wider than the image of a child asking for money at a signal. Under the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, children living or working on the streets, abandoned or orphaned children, missing or runaway children, and those facing abuse, exploitation, trafficking, substance abuse or a lack of proper parental care can fall within the broader category of children in need of care and protection.
The draft guidelines divide CiSS into three broad groups. The first covers children living on the streets without parental or family support. The second includes children who spend the day begging, rag-picking or selling goods but return to families in nearby settlements at night. The third covers children living on the streets with their families, including migrant families involved in construction, casual labour or rag-picking. The framework also identifies child labourers, abandoned children, children vulnerable to trafficking or substance use, children with disabilities without parental care, children in sibling care and those from highly vulnerable families.
This classification matters because a single rescue model cannot address all these situations. A child separated from family requires a different response from a child accompanying migrant parents at a construction site. Similarly, a child pushed into begging through coercion presents a different protection and legal question from one whose family depends on informal work and lacks access to welfare schemes. The draft therefore treats street presence as a condition requiring assessment, rather than as proof of one uniform cause.
The department has identified several barriers that make such assessment difficult. Many surveyed children have never attended school, while the situation reportedly worsened after the Covid period. Substance use, including inhalants such as correction fluid and adhesives and the use of tobacco, has been reported among some children. Children also face risks of sexual exploitation, trafficking and child labour. Without Aadhaar, ration cards or birth certificates, children and their families can remain outside government schemes even when they may otherwise qualify for support.
Migration adds another layer to the problem. Delhi has both seasonal and permanent migrant populations, and some families live or work in conditions that make stable access to schooling, shelter and documentation difficult. Access to permanent and temporary night shelters run by the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board is described in the draft’s context as inconsistent. This means that the question is not only whether officials can remove children from a traffic signal, but whether the city can offer a safe and durable alternative afterward.
The proposed institutional response begins with district-level mapping of hotspots and continuous, field-based identification rather than one-time surveys. District Child Protection Units would maintain databases containing information on location, age, gender, vulnerability, interventions and restoration status. Universities, including the Delhi School of Social Work, Tata Institute of Social Sciences and Jamia Millia Islamia, may support surveys and research, subject to ethical approval.
Each district would have an outreach team led by a district magistrate and facilitated by the District Child Protection Unit. These teams would undertake regular outreach, counselling, rescue and referrals, with at least one special night drive every month. The proposed rescue kit includes food, water, clothing, hygiene supplies, first aid, information about Child Helpline 1098 and details of nearby shelters.
The draft also establishes a sequence of deadlines. After rescue, a child must receive immediate safety and basic support and be produced before the Child Welfare Committee within 24 hours. Family tracing and an individual care plan are to be completed within seven days. A social investigation report, followed by school admission, the start of skill training or a reintegration process, is proposed within 15 days.
These timelines create a framework for accountability, but their effectiveness will depend on the quality of the information collected and the capacity of the agencies expected to act on it. A database can record a location and an intervention, but it cannot by itself resolve disputed identity, family separation, migration, addiction, coercion or the absence of documents. The guidelines’ emphasis on repeated field engagement recognises that children who move between signals, settlements, shelters and workplaces cannot be understood through a single survey.
The proposal’s approach to institutionalisation is also important. It states that institutional care should be the last resort. Where poverty or family distress is driving begging, the preferred response is family strengthening and welfare support. The draft lists assistance such as ration cards, Aadhaar camps, Pradhan Mantri Awas support, Jan Dhan accounts, Mission Vatsalya sponsorship, admissions under the Right to Education framework, Ayushman Bharat and employment support. Sports and physical activities are proposed as ways to support confidence, discipline, teamwork and social inclusion while reducing exposure to substance use, exploitation and violence.
This welfare-linked approach reflects the fact that child protection and urban inclusion cannot be separated. A family without documents may be unable to access food support, healthcare or housing-related assistance. A child without a stable address may struggle to enrol in school. A migrant family working in informal construction or waste collection may remain visible in public space but invisible to the systems intended to provide protection. The guidelines attempt to connect these gaps through district teams and referrals rather than treating each problem as an isolated case.
At the same time, the framework distinguishes poverty from exploitation. Where parents or guardians are found to have coerced a child into begging or exposed the child to trafficking or other abuse, the guidelines propose legal action while safeguarding the child’s best interests. This distinction prevents family assistance from becoming a substitute for protection in cases where the family environment itself is unsafe.
The draft’s larger urban question is whether Delhi can turn a fragmented set of interventions into a continuous child-protection system. The proposed mapping, databases, outreach teams, referral pathways and time limits provide an administrative structure. The participation of police, departments, NGOs, universities and civil society recognises that no single agency controls the conditions in which street-connected children live and work.
The available material does not establish how many children would be covered, what budget would support the guidelines, when they would be notified or how performance would be measured across districts. Those details will determine whether the framework becomes a functioning public system or remains a statement of intent. The next stages to watch are the finalisation of the draft, the allocation of district responsibilities, the operation of the proposed databases and the implementation of the timelines for protection, family tracing, education and reintegration.
