Child labour is cruel alright, but who is to take care of the freed children?
Child labour is cruel alright, but who is to take care of the freed children?
By Tashi Dolma Thinley
KATHMANDU, Dec 21 [2001] - Twelve-year-old Shivam leans on an electric pole near a garbage dump in the main street of Newroad, emptily blowing smoke rings as he tells of a life that has been excruciatingly tough.
When he was back home in Humla, his days revolved around a bhatti (shanty liquor shop) that his parents were running. There he had his fill of drunkards, junkies, and brawls. Humla was a nightmare for the boy barely into his teens.
Then Kathmandu beckoned with the promise of a job in a carpet factory where his parents had once worked. His parents had told him that there were hundreds of kids like him working at the factory. Little did he know that things had changed.
Under pressure from child rights groups and with some carpet-buying countries not willing to buy a product that has used child labour, the government last year had got the carpet owners to lay off the children from these factories.
When the boy went to the Kathmandu factory, he was told there were no jobs for kids like him. The factory owner, like many other employers, was compelled to toe the line of anti-child labour activists.
‘I left home thinking that the carpet factory would hire me, but they told me the authorities did not want people of my age to work. It might be a good thing done by the government, but where does it leave people like me?’ asks a desperate Shivam.
Indeed, where did that leave him? On the Kathmandu streets and begging…
There are now hundreds of children like Shivam rag-picking and begging on the country’s streets after the authorities bowed into international pressure and conventions that child labour ought to be gradually eliminated. These children find jobs hard to come by, and there are not many organisations working towards getting these kids a shelter, decent education, and all the other things of a normal childhood.
"It’s not merely enough to stop child labour, it’s absolutely essential that these child labourers are given all the facilities that can help them fend for themselves in adulthood," says a child rights activist.
Shivam couldn’t have agreed more. He says poignantly, "This world is so unrealistic, they speak against child labour and then we find that that we have nothing to eat."
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Children says that all actions affecting children should place priority on what is in the best interest of the children involved. But in Nepal’s reality, the anti-child labour drive seems to have done more harm than good to the working children.
"We need to be far more sensitive to what actually works for children and more sophisticated in planning our actions. The Nepali government has failed to develop any kind of infrastructure for the rehabilitation of street children, and even most of the INGOs and NGOs have also failed," says Sumnima Tuladhar, information chief at the INGO CWIN (Child Workers in Nepal).
What has happened in many cases of children being denied work, is that they are now increasingly becoming vulnerable to a world of violence, thievery, abject neglect, sexual exploitation and chemical addiction.
The new awareness about barring children from working has also meant that in many cases children are employed in the ‘backyards’, hidden from public glare. This also means that there is nobody to ensure a decent wage for them, nor are their living conditions anything to write home about.
Thirteen-year-old Ramu two years back used to get Rs 40 a day working in the sooty kitchen of a tea stall, but now that wage has come down to 15. He says he can’t ask the owner for his earlier pay because the owner thinks that by continuing to hire him he is doing the boy a favour.
But even with the concerted campaign to stop children from working, CWIN figures say there are around 2.6 million child labourers in Nepal, with around one million of them involved in what are called "worst forms of child labour".
Nepal, signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of Children, has pledged that by the year 2005, atleast the worst forms of child labour will be eliminated. But the question to be asked is: If that happens at all, who will take care of these freed children, and where will they go?
Will they all be emptily blowing smoke rings like Shivam near a garbage dump?
