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ChildLine India provides a crisis intervention assistance service to children on the streets with any problem (health, safety, abuse, abandonment, problems with the police and justice systems, wanting to be reunited with their families& ). The service is run by small teams of social workers assisted by street children and it uses a Freephone number 10-9-8. In 1998, CIVA developed a replication strategy for this programme, which at the time was operational in Mumbai (Bombay) only. CIVA prepared an application to the Community Fund of the UK National Lottery, and arranged a partnership between CHILDLINE UK and ChildLine India for this grant. CIVA also worked with ChildLine India to enlist the assistance of the Government of India as a partner in the programme. Today, ChildLine India is operational in all major Indian cities (over 200 of them) and has taken over 4 million distress calls since its inception. It is backed by the Government of India. In 2002, ChildLine India and CHILDLINE UK organised an international conference in Amsterdam to explore ways of extending the idea of children’s telephone helplines internationally, which brought together existing children’s helplines from around the world. This led to the setting up of Child Helpline International, which is based in the Netherlands and is funded by PLAN International, to promote the concept of children’s helplines and assist in their being established in countries where no existing services exist. For more information visit www.childhelplineinternational.org |