Sunlight has still not reached the shanty settlement nestled near Parsik Hills, just off suburban Kalwa's railway tracks. The 350 plus hovels, however, are abuzz with activity. The women put out fires, pack food and take that one last look in the mirror. It's time to go looking for babies to hire.

Mallamma Malepu, 35, arrives at her distant relative Sundari Malepu's house across the settlement, ready to pick up Srinu, a ten-month-old baby she hires for begging. "We have an understanding for Rs50. While others keep hiking up the rent, Sundari is family and we have kept the rate fixed for a year," she tells us. "I also ensure that I make at least Rs250-300 every day so that her family and mine can both make enough."

The question seems only too obvious. Won't the child cry? "No. He knows his peddamma (Telugu for mother's sister). He has been going out with me for several months now. I carry some milk and buy him a toffee if he cries too much," she says. Only when we look unconvinced and prod further, does she reveal her secret. "We just give him a little opium that is sold here in the settlement. It is not harmful," she says while looking to a vessel-scrubbing Sundari for reassurance.

Sundari's own husband Ramulu died last year. Draped in a sari, begging at the Teen Hath Naka signal in Thane, he was chased by eunuchs who were enraged by his encroachment of their designated post. While running, he is said to have slipped, at which point his right foot was run over. Sundari says, "We couldn't continue treatment. His broken foot began to rot and then he died. I take my three-year-olds, my daughter Tunga my son Veerabhadra when I go with a harmonium to beg," As she curses her daughter for not waking up, Sundari adds, "I know hiring out Srinu may seem cruel to you, but where am I going to get enough money to take care of us and also send back for my in-laws back in Anantpur?"

Srinu, though, isn't an exception. Babies from this settlement can be found at most stations along both central and western railway lines, and also at tourist haunts like Juhu beach, Chowpatty and the Gateway of India. Even infants are put to work.

"They are actually in greater demand because they help make more money," says Rajamma Ganpati, 36. Sick with fever and cough, she drinks greenish water drawn from a dilapidated well that stands in the middle of the settlement. Her still unnamed child is less than a month old and can be often cranky. "She keeps crying but I have to send her out to beg. After all I have two more children to feed," she says while quickly hiding the Rs100 she has collected from neighbour Gouramma as rent for her child before her husband wakes up. "Whatever little he earns, he spends on his drinking. If he sees this money, he'll fight and take it away."

In another corner of this settlement, 49-year-old Hanumanta Chellu is busy. He is renting Chinamma Ugurappa, 9, and her baby sister Laxmi for Rs125 a day. Chellu, who we are told, works for the local slumlord, uses these children to beg on local trains and streets. As they leave for work, the girls are warned to meet their day's target of Rs300. Without it, their parents will receive nothing and the girls will get a sound thrashing. "If we collect around Rs300 in a day, our parents are happy. If not, they beat us," confirms Chinamma without batting an eye-lid. "When my mother applies vermillion on my head for luck every day, she never forgets to warn us about making enough money."

May turned out to be a bad month for the Ugurappa family. The railway police confiscated their harmonium at the Dombivli station, and Chellu claims he had to pay Rs500 as a bribe to get it back in a week. "If I help them out in their time of need, am I wrong in expecting them to earn and make it up?" he asks. According to him there are beggar colonies like these exist in a Shivaji Nagar slum too. "But there they have to pay protection money to the local bhais just to put up a shanty," he points out.

Most of the families in this slum are from the drought hit-Rayalseema region of Andhra Pradesh, North Karnataka's Raichur-Gulbarga belt, Beed in Marathwada and the Akola district in Vidarbha. They have neither ration-cards nor voter IDs. Disenfranchised and not on the radar of any government scheme, no local elected representatives or administration has ever shown interest in them.

50-year-old Bhagabai Shinde who hails from Akola should know. "We never had land. All our cattle died in the 1972 drought. That's when we came to Mumbai from Akola. First we stayed on the pavements at Dadar. When the police kept chasing us away, my husband who ran into some villagers from our native place brought us here in 1985," remembers the widow. Both her sons repair stoves. "But nowadays who uses kerosene stoves? So they often come home with very little." Bhagabai herself goes to nursing home in Kalwa where she sweeps and mops the place twice a day for Rs 900 a month. "We often have nothing to eat. We've been living like this for several years now." She points out how many Marathi speaking neighbours are from farmer suicide country of Vidarbha.

TISS ex-faculty and social welfare administration expert Dr Vidya Rao admits that it is challenging to work with communities like these. "Though some rare examples of the homeless getting ration cards are heard of in Mumbai and Chennai, the intense competition between members for every piece of bread, makes it difficult to organise or unite them, unlike other marginalised groups that face exclusion. The fact that they deeply distrust people who pry into their ingenious source of income makes it that much more difficult." According to her, a society which wants to deny their existence often ends up using their services for nefarious reasons. "Given their abject poverty and destitution, some people use them for activities like arrack and drug smuggling. Even if they get caught, their word rarely holds against the man who hired their services. "

Across the city, at the south western beach of Juhu, tourists and locals flock the warm-toned sands in the evening. The kids from the Kalwa slum are a study in contrast from the privileged ones being fussed over with bhel and ice-cream and photographed. Sitamma Malappa eyes a young couple pay the autorickshaw and head to the beach. She nudges little Bhanu, 10 and points them out. In silhouette, one can see the couple trying to fob off her and the baby she carries. Ultimately they give up and a victorious Bhanu runs back with the baby and Rs10 note. She hands over both to Sitamma and joins her friends in a game of hop-scotch she had left mid-way.