Banking on the Future
Ajay is thirteen years old and runs a bank. His customers are other street children in India, kids who beg, shine shoes, or scavenge for a living and have nowhere else to put the little money they earn. The film follows this child-run banking system, showing children counting rupees, keeping ledgers, and making decisions about savings and loans for peers who would otherwise be easy targets for theft or exploitation by adults. Interviews with the young account holders and the children who manage the branch explain how the system works day to day: deposits collected on the street, records kept by hand, and disputes settled among the kids themselves. The film treats the bank as a practical response to a specific problem, money with no safe place to go, rather than as a charity story, and lets Ajay and his colleagues describe the responsibility in their own words. It is a small, concrete picture of children building an institution adults usually control.