Society for Children (SOCH)

Society for Children (SOCH) is a non-profit organisation established in 2012 and registered under the Societies Registration Act XXI of 1860, registration number 23515/51 at IGR Cuttack, Odisha. It works with children who have fallen outside every safety net: those who are runaway, missing, abducted, abandoned or trafficked, along with children living with addiction and school dropouts. Its interventions run along a single chain, from rescuing a child at a railway station through residential rehabilitation and back into formal schooling or work. Alongside this direct rescue work, SOCH runs a community track built on the belief that a child's outcomes depend on the whole ecosystem around them, so it also works with families, women's self-help groups, adolescent girls, elderly people and persons with disabilities. It works largely in Odisha, with operations recorded in Bhubaneswar, Pipili and Paradeep.

Major Areas of Work

• Rescue of children at risk: Identifying and rescuing runaway, missing, abducted, abandoned and trafficked children, with railway stations as the primary point of intervention.

• Rehabilitation and de-addiction: Residential behaviour modification and de-addiction work with children who have hard behavioural patterns or substance dependence.

• Education and reintegration: Bringing dropout children back to formal schooling through bridge education, and reuniting rescued children with their families.

• Youth mainstreaming: Counselling, vocational training and job placement for orphan and semi-orphan youths so they can support themselves.

• Community and disaster response: Long-term community development around the child, plus relief and support for families displaced by cyclones and other disasters.

Major Initiatives and Programmes

• Programme Rakshyak: Rescues and resettles runaway, missing, abducted, abandoned and trafficked children, operating primarily at railway stations and working towards reuniting them with family.

• Programme Punarjivan: Residential camps combining behaviour modification, de-addiction and educational bridging, run as a one-month de-addiction camp and a three-month education bridge camp.

• Programme Pankh: Works to mainstream orphan and semi-orphan youths into society through data collection, counselling, vocational training enrolment and job placement.

• Child Centred Community Development (CCCD): Works across the different parts of a child's ecosystem, including women's self-help groups, adolescent girls, elderly people and persons with disabilities, to achieve holistic community development.

• Child Centred Disaster Response (CCDR): Supports children through families affected or displaced by disasters and natural calamities, covering relief distribution, dry ration kits and nutritional support.

Programme Rakshyak is the organisation's flagship and the entry point for much of its other work. Rescue teams operate at railway stations, which are where children who have run away or been trafficked most often surface. A rescued child is then routed onward within SOCH's own chain: reunification with family where possible, Punarjivan's residential camps where de-addiction or bridge education is needed, and Pankh where a young person has no family to return to.

Impact

For the period 2012 to 31 March 2022, SOCH states it rescued 5,904 children and reunited 4,273 of them with their families, received 602 referrals, and ran 10 residential de-addiction camps enrolling 206 children. It reports 188 children de-addicted out of the 205 who completed those camps, describing this as a 75 percent rate. Its own figures also cite 134 children enrolled across six completed education bridge camps with 104 continuing formal education afterwards, 3,386 youth surveyed and 279 enrolled in vocational training under Pankh, 644 children plus 420 women through self-help groups reached in 50 rural and urban communities, relief for more than 2,000 families during Cyclone Fani and dry ration kits for 4,000 families during COVID-19.

Partners

It maintains partnerships and collaborations with the Indian Railways, the Railway Protection Force, Odisha Police, The Gratitude Network, FOCCO and Advent, and its work has been recognised by the India CSR Summit in the CSR implementing agency category and by the Giving Back Awards.

Working here suits someone who wants direct field exposure to child protection rather than a policy vantage point. The work is close to the ground: railway platform rescue operations, residential camps, casework with families and district level coordination with police and railway authorities. It gives a rounded view of the child protection system in India, because the same organisation handles rescue, rehabilitation, education and livelihood rather than specialising in one link of that chain. It fits people comfortable in a small, regionally focused organisation where roles are broad and the outcomes are measured one child at a time.