India's five-year-old policeman

BBC News:

At a time when most children prepare to go to school, Saurabh Nagvanshi is off to the office.

Saurabh works at a police station in Raipur, the capital of India's central state of Chhattisgarh. He is five years old.

He is part of an Indian system that allows a family member to take the post of a government employee who dies while in service.

There is no age limit and many families have no alternative but to send young children to work to make ends meet.

Saurabh has to feed a family of five and so his mother, Ishwari Devi Nagvanshi, holds his hand and takes him the 110km (68 miles) from Bilaspur, where they live, to Raipur.

In this surrogate police job, a child must work one day and go to school the next.

At work, the children are asked to do filing and bring tea and water for senior officials.

The children are paid 2,500 rupees ($57) a month.

At an age when children are learning how to write, Saurabh now knows how to sign his name when he receives his monthly salary.

He is quiet. If you try to talk to him he will either run away or hide behind his mother.

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