ABSTRACT
This chapter locates poor urban children within families as the first step towards attending to poor children’s schooling and childhoods in a contextualised manner. Based on interviews with parents and students, the chapter discusses families’ stories of migrating to Indore, parents’ struggles to find work as well as their working conditions. It also presents instances of children migrating to Indore to live with extended families or friends in order to pursue school education in Indore. In particular, the chapter attends to the social and economic uncertainty faced by families, the way caste locations of families shape access to work in cities and children’s gendered role in their own and their families’ socioeconomic survival. This chapter is the first step towards challenging the labour/school binary that flows from dominant discourses on childhood, especially in the context of aid programmes, and assumes that children at school do not labour. In the process, the chapter unravels the gendered and classed nature of children’s work, locates families within broader logics of caste and class inequalities and offers a nuanced analysis of differences within and between caste groups.
