India

Some of the children didn’t know where they’d come from, the names of their parents, or how they’d ended up at the railway station, but through rugby, they’d not only find food, but also education, and maybe even international rugby.

About a decade ago, it was estimated around 113,000 children lived in railway stations across India. Some had left home of their own accord, many had been forced out, some were unsure how they had even ended up there, just knowing it was their home and the kids around them were family. India international Sukumar Handro was once among their number. “I only knew the railway station, I don’t even know how I got here,” Sukumar tells Rugby Journal.  “I can’t remember my parents, I just know that when they left me at the station, I was with friends. 

“We stole food, money, and we’d try to sleep anywhere at the railway station, maybe in a train if we could, hiding under a seat. We weren’t allowed to stay there, so the cops would come and find us, beat us and tell us to get out. The hardest thing was when we couldn’t find any food; we were always hungry.”

Aged seven, Sukumar was moved into a hostel by a charity, and it was from here, a year later, that he first found his way to the ‘Jungle Crows’. The organisation, officially called Khelo Rugby, but still known by many as the Jungle Crows, uses rugby as a way to keep kids in education. 

Back then, for Sukumar – now 26 (or 27, he’s not entirely sure of his exact birthdate) – there was a more rudimentary reason for wanting to play. “When I was first in the hostel, we weren’t allowed to go out,” he says. “They told us, ‘if you want to go out, then you have to play rugby!’ We’d go to the rugby and they’d give us food too, which was amazing, we loved it.”

Today, Sukumar, as well as being an international, is also captain of his state, West Bengal, and a key player for Khelo Rugby’s senior men’s side, Future Hope Harlequins, who are widely considered to be the second-best side in the country behind the Delhi Hurricanes. He’s also now a Khelo Rugby coach for under-18s boys and girls, and when we meet him in Kolkata, he’s part of the team hosting a session, with guest coach, ex-All Black Norm Maxwell. 

The session has lasted most of the Saturday morning, taking place on the Crows’ Nest – their very own rugby pitch, part of the sprawling, 400-acre Maidan park right in the heart of the city. It’s unlike any park you’ve ever visited: every sport is being played from kabaddi and squash to cricket and horse racing, but it’s also cheek by jowl, with some of the brutal realities of Kolkata life. Herds of goats are being tended – often tempted to the pitch’s periphery due to lusher chunks of grass they find there – while straying from the network of paths is unadvisable
due to the presence of human faeces. 

Kolkata is both spectacular and challenging all at once. Colour is found everywhere, as are the difficulties faced by India as a whole when it comes to population, poverty and employment. People find work where they can: every five minutes there’s a different person rocking up to the pitch offering something, be it water or a piping hot cup of masala chai.

The Jungle Crows’ story is one that’s been told several times, even by the Rugby Journal, after we visited five years ago, but as Indian rugby hits headlines in its own right, with the announcement of its new professional league – we’ll come on to that later – it’s a story that never gets old. 

Englishman Paul Walsh – albeit one very proud of his Irish ancestry – has been a beating heart of the Jungle Crows for twenty years. He moved to India in 2002, as a British diplomat to the British Deputy High Commission. “I expected to be here three years, then it was off to next job,” he admits. “The Jungle Crows was started by me and a couple of mates inside the high commission, and we thought we could play a bit of rugby. So, we took some of the drivers from our office, some of the security guards and got hold of a rugby ball. 

“It was just as a bit of a laugh,” he continues. “We thought we’d enter a tournament, train up these kids, and played a bit of rugby.”

They entered a tournament, playing at Calcutta Cricket and Football Club (CCFC), the club that donated the original Calcutta Cup contested by England and Scotland every year, and began a ‘movement’, as Paul describes it.

Word spread about their regular training sessions; more kids arrived. “We were playing on parts of the Maidan,” continues Paul, “and you’d get these kids come wandering along, a bit lost. A kid who hangs around at four or five o’clock in the afternoon, who’s on his own, is a kid who’s probably flunked school, who’s got not much to do, who hasn’t got much motivation. And they’d come up to us, see that ball and say, ‘can we join in?’.

“We had like ten to fifteen youngsters playing, and they’d say, ‘can we teach this to more people?’. And they’d be going into their own communities, into their slums, going into the places where they live, and taking a few rugby balls and playing with them.  It’s was a way for them to do something good, not with any great motivation, just to share the game and the passion that they’ve found in the game.”

Roughly 1.5 million people live in the slums of Kolkata, around a third of its inner-city population. We’re taken to one of the many slums where Khelo Rugby works and on the patch of land alongside an inner-city village of makeshift housing – where bamboo provides a structure for plastic roofs, or myriad other materials cobbled together in a house-like shape – the excitement over rugby is unlike anything you’ve seen. Four coaches manage to organise what seems like a hundred children into some semblance of order for a series of games, songs, and activities, all with the rugby ball at the centre. 

“Most of the kids we coach are actually coming from different slums in Kolkata,” explains Pratap Kondu, who leads the coaching programme for Khelo Rugby. “There would be about 36 different slums where we work, and basically we go and drop a rugby ball in the slums and try to attract all these kids to come and play, because most of the time, these kids don’t have anything to do.

“They say it’s like a dinosaur egg,” he laughs. “But once they get attracted to this ball, they keep coming back, we get them to go to school, because that’s the most important part of our project – we try to make sure all of our kids are getting education. 

“For these kids, life in the slum is very difficult,” he explains. “Early in the morning mum and dad leave the house, because they are all labourers in different areas, everybody has to work , so these kids don’t have anybody to guide them.” 

Pratap is the perfect example of what can be achieved by the project. “I started playing rugby when I was a kid like them, with Khelo Rugby,” he explains. “I actually got kicked out of my house, because my mum got married to someone else when my father passed away. The new stepfather didn’t like me to be with them, and he asked me to get out and go and work somewhere at the age of eight. I decided to get out of my house and spent six months in a railway station where I just begged for food, I was just one of street kids.”

He left because staying meant misery for his mum. “He’d been telling my mum that I had to leave, and I’m not leaving, he was torturing my mum, so I knew if I stayed longer, my mum would get tortured more by that person,” he says. “I remember the first day I actually ran away from my house and I had twenty rupees (20p) in my pocket and the first night I was sleeping in the station, I was thinking, ‘I’ll wake up tomorrow morning, buy some food and I’ll figure out what I’m going to do’.  When I woke up my rupees has been stolen by pickpockets while I was sleeping, so I had nothing, and didn’t know what to do. I was hungry, and just had to start begging.”

He’s remarkably sanguine when he describes the actions of his parents. “I understand now because I realise now that he got married, maybe he didn’t realise that my mum had a baby or something,” he says. “He didn’t kick me out, he just said, ‘I don’t want you to stay with me’. It’s not unusual,” he surmises. “In India, you can see hundreds of the kids in the street, so I decided to join them.”

As with Sukumar, a charity helped move Pratap into a hostel where he also found his way to Khelo Rugby. “I got shelter, and a good education, with the help of Khelo, and I not only learnt to play rugby, but I’ve played for my club, my country, my state.” Such was the influence of Khelo, he even made it to university. “And when I finished my degree,” he continues, “I realised that Khelo Rugby is a good job that we need to do, so I joined Paul, and now I’m working with him to help all of these kids. Now I’m actually running this project, I actually feel like this is where I belong,” he adds. “I can understand them well, because I actually come from the same background. I can be very useful for them to understand their background, understanding their problems, and you know, finding some solutions so they can do well in their life. 

“That’s what we do,” he says. “Guide them in their life: play with them, take care of them, make sure that they’re going to school and, once they are in high school, we make sure that they go for degree-level college.”

Naturally he’s acutely aware of the problems they face. “Child labour is the biggest problem,” he explains. “These kids get dragged into different kinds of work in their communities so, at the age of thirteen, they start working, which they shouldn’t be, and there’s everything that comes from it. Out of all these kids I’d say that most of the families have one person, mum or dad, that’s drunk all day and not looking after their families.”

The work of the charities and organisations across the city has helped considerably reduce the number of children on the railways. “I feel like there’s lots of programmes from governments and lots of different NGOs, that mean street kids are getting lesser and lesser and it’s a good sign because they’re getting put into spaces where they can live a good life. I would say in twenty years, we have delivered like almost three-to-four hundred kids from the slums to get hired into good jobs in the different parts of India.” 

Pratap is in that number. “Rugby changed me a lot,” he says. “I was drug-addicted when I was staying with my group in a railway station. I was having everything from vodka, cigarettes, alcohol, everything. But I came to rugby, it made me want to play for India,” he says. “That was my dream, the first time I was actually introduced to the sport, I just wanted to play the highest level of the sport. 

“That helped me to quit all these things and changed me, it made me a better person, you know all these rugby values, you know, respect, discipline and integrity. Rugby helped me to understand real life, to give me the motivation to study, to have a career.”

Rugby in India has moved on significantly in recent times. It was traditionally run by people from an elite level of society, and was not a mass-participation sport like cricket or soccer, but now projects such as Khelo are helping to target children beyond the typical demographic. “It’s now a sport in India that’s dominated often by kids from quite rural backgrounds,” Paul says. “In Kolkata these kids are from very disadvantaged backgrounds. The player base is changing. We did a big project in Odisha, which is a state south of here, that then meant that the rugby went into very rural areas, and we had more than a thousand kids playing there.”

Pathways have been developed that truly make a difference, not just a pathway from nice middle class school child to international England player, but from poverty to a professional career – not just the rugby-playing kind. “In the last five years rugby has become this game that is giving benefits to young people,” says Paul.  “There are benefits now for a player who plays for India or plays for their state. Sport in India has transformed because the government is now realising that it is a very effective way to motivate and organise young people and it’s also an important part of how India is portrayed around the world. 

“Winning Olympic medals, doing well in sporting events is important, as is hosting events,” continues Paul. Rugby doesn’t yet get much government funding despite its Olympic status. “They’re going to invest in sports likely to give them medals, like shooting and obviously cricket when it comes to the LA Olympics – that’s going to be massive – but that’s the same with every country. But rugby is getting more attention and if we can scoop up some of the funding that comes from corporates and foundations, then that’s pretty good for us – we’ll take that.” 

As Pratap mentioned, Paul has also seen great strides when it comes to fighting homelessness in the city. “It’s getting better every year,” he says. “There were lots of street kids; you’d go to any of the main railway stations in the city, you’d find children. They all gravitated towards the stations because there were little gangs they could be part of and maybe, in the goods yard, they could find a place to stay. 

“They’d look after each other,” explains Paul. “And they could find a little way of making money, perhaps collecting plastic bottles, collecting rubbish, doing that sort of recycling work.”

It’s still a problem, as Paul explains while pointing out examples of different stories among the kids playing in front of us. “If you look at these kids here,” he says, “and you’ve someone like Aaron [he points to a teenager in an orange top] and he’s from a very rural location. He doesn’t know where he’s from exactly, he doesn’t know his real name – but just found himself abandoned and living in the station. That’s the sort of typical story they have: family breaks down; someone loses a job; family might say they can’t afford to feed a kid, so they’ll say ‘you go to the city and you can be looked after’. And they get on the train and end up here, alone.  

“But,” he adds, “the family know that they’ll perhaps be safer and better off in the city than with them.”

Organising rugby in a country the size of India is challenging. There’s no national league. “Kolkata is the only place that has a league, so we have a little season,” explains Paul. “Kolkata Police, CCFC, and we’ll put in a couple of teams.”

Future Hope Harlequins (Future Hope is a similar organisation, founded before Khelo) are playing in the one-off national championship shortly after we leave Kolkata. “We play four games over a week,” continues Paul.  Fifteens? “Yeah, it’s exhausting for them. Last year we lost to Delhi Hurricanes in the final but by that point the guys were absolutely knackered and they [Delhi] are a much bigger, better-organised side. We basically thought, ‘sod it, we’ve come second at least’, and lost about 100-0.

“In the last couple of years, club rugby has changed a lot,” says Paul. “The Indian army used to play rugby and, at senior level, they would dominate, but they’ve stopped playing, so now the game is dominated by Delhi Hurricanes who are very serious about it, and their kids are huge; that’s why they’re national champions.”

The 2024 national championship is made up of ten sides in the men’s comp and seven in the women’s – and Future Hope Harlequins repeat their 2023 runners-up placing in the men’s and come third in the women’s.

The game is hoping for a shot in the arm following the recent announcement of Rugby India’s intention to establish a professional league for sevens. “It’ll be six teams, and they’ll pay a fee to enter a league,” says Paul. “What we’re curious about is the model, because the six teams will pay [the equivalent to] £150,000 to buy a franchise and, what I’m very interested in is how the player pool will work. Will it be a draft system or auction? It can’t just be a scramble to get the best players otherwise the side with the best intelligence [or most money] is just going to end up with the best players.”

Such has been the immense success of the Indian Cricket League, other sports have been looking at professional leagues to try and tempt the rich who are a tier or three below the billionaires involved with cricket. “There’s lot of ego involved in collecting these franchise teams,” says Paul. “Nobody can afford a cricket team, kabaddi and hockey are expensive, so people are picking up these lower tier franchises.

“This is how it was explained to me,” continues Paul. “I know a guy who owns one of the pro volleyball teams out of Kolkata. He sold his business for £300m and he just wants to do something in volleyball. That’s India, there’s huge money here.

“I’ve met someone interested in the Kolkata rugby franchise,” adds Paul. “I asked him why this guy wants to buy it, and it’s because he studied in Australia, saw rugby league, like that game, and thought it was easy to follow, so he’s going to try rugby union. He’s a real-estate guy.”

Whatever the mechanics of the new league, it’s got to be positive. “Anything that raises the profile of the game is good,” Paul says. “If and when it comes off, it’ll not only raise the profile that much more, but give experience to lots of players.”

Paul clearly has misgivings about some of the operational side of the proposed league, but his focus instead returns to his own project and its aims. “I want to get more kids playing rugby,” he says, succinctly. “We like the seniors playing tournaments, it’s nice to be part of that, but that’s not what really wakes us up and gets us playing and coaching. What’s great is working with the youngsters in the slums and seeing their journeys. 

“I went to watch India under-18s, in Kathmandhu, we had two players in the squad, and I said to Pratap, ‘When I started the Jungle Crows, they hadn’t even been born’. And I thought how nice that was – we’ve been there for their entire journey. It’s quite incredible, and we just want to help more kids with their journeys.”

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by  Jungle Crows & Kristian Kane

This extract was taken from issue 25 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.