CRY Child Rights and You

CRY Child Rights and You (formerly Child Relief and You) is an independent, non-religious, non-political, registered non-profit organization in India. It works towards restoring basic rights to children, especially from India and works across levels from direct action to advocacy, mobilizing public opinion and policy change. It focuses mainly on the 4 basic rights of survival, development, protection and participation which were defined by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), an international human rights treaty which has been ratified by 192 countries.

The CRC is built on certain "foundation principles" that underpin all other children's rights. The CRC confers the following basic rights on all children across the world, without discrimination:

The right to survival to life, health, nutrition, name and nationality
The right to development to education, care, leisure, recreation
The right to protection from exploitation, abuse, neglect
The right to participation to expression, information, thought and religion.

CRY works to ensure these rights to all categories of children, who could be street children, children bonded in labor, children of commercial sex workers, physically and mentally challenged children and children in juvenile institutions, or even children in privileged homes.

Founded

CRY was founded in the year 1979 by a 25 year airline purser, Rippan Kapur and his seven friends. They started with Rs. 50 and a dining table.

The founders of CRY chose not to found a grassroots-level implementing organization or to work directly with children. They instead made CRY a link between individuals who could provide resources on the one hand, and the fieldworkers who were struggling to function for lack of them on the other. They saw their role as "enablers" and thereby created a unique model of a community movement. Today, CRY aims to be a peoples' movement for the rights of India's children encompassing diverse segments, each pledging their particular strengths, working in partnership for their common cause.