Conflict pushes more kids to work in Nepal
KATHMANDU: Dipak Budhamagar wants to be a farmer like his father, who was killed by Maoist terrorists during the Tihar festival last November for fleeing a rebel forced labour camp after a month’s labour. But this barely 14-year-old, diminutive boy from a village in Rolpa district, a Maoist stronghold, instead ended up a ‘khalasi’ (helper) in Kathmandu, shouting at the top of his lungs to attract would-be passengers into a three-wheeler ‘tempo’. During his three-month stint on the tempo (a job he did previously when he came to Kathmandu to search for his mother, who left their family to marry another man), Dipak received one meal and 70 rupees (less than one US dollar) as daily wages for nearly 15 hours of hard labour.
Then the boy was taken in by Child Workers in Nepal Concerned Centre (CWIN), the largest non-governmental organisation (NGO) for children in Nepal. Now he stays in one of their shelters and also attends school, where he studies in Grade 4. At his age, most children in cities are in at least Grade 8, just a year away from completing secondary-level education.
“I want to go to my village and till our land,” Dipak told IPS. “We have a big piece of farmland.” But he cannot go back to his village for he is a hunted boy. After seeing his father stabbed and killed by cadres of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), Dipak hurled a stone during a Maoist meeting a few weeks later, injuring one rebel. He then fled from. But the rebels soon caught him, struck him on the head with a sickle (the injury mark is still visible) and took him to a hospital in neighbouring Dang district. Dipak escaped two days later and Royal Nepalese Army personnel took him to the capital Kathmandu and gave him Rs200 to fend for himself.
That was when he started his second stint on the tempo. Dipak is far from alone as a child who fled his home and is now forced to work to survive. Girls fare worse than boys, and are more prone to sexual exploitation, according to experts. Some girls shared their experiences at an interaction programme-cum-group birthday celebration on Friday organised by the Underprivileged Children’s Education Programme.
Many said they were forced to leave their villages due to threats from Maoists. Today they work in restaurants and carpet factories, among others, facing hardships that range from low wages to sexual abuse. Most of the children who flee home (or are sent away by their parents to prevent their forced recruitment by the Maoists) end up in Nepal’s urban areas, either as domestic help, ‘khalasi’ like Dipak or child labourers in carpet factories, stone quarries or brick kilns.
An April 30 CWIN report (based on data collated from its own surveys and others by the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) and the International Labour Organisation (ILO), among others, shows that around 40,000 children have been displaced by conflict since 1996, when the now-outlawed Maoist party launched its armed uprising. More than 12,000 people have already been killed, among them 361 children.
“The situation has turned from bad to worse,” says CWIN President Gauri Pradhan. “The child labour problem has increased due to the armed conflict.” Frequent school closures caused by the Maoists’ general and educational strikes, forced indoctrination and clashes between security forces and insurgents have compelled many children to leave their village and seek refuge in urban areas, he added in an interview.
Some children are fleeing the Maoists ranks, and so are hunted by both the security forces and the insurgents. Many go to neighbouring India as well. A study conducted by Save the Children Alliance at four transit points near the western city of Nepalgunj, from June to August 2004, found some 17,000 children crossing over to India seeking jobs and shelter. “Based on trend analysis and observation and appeals for help received by the CWIN Helpline, we know that the problem has worsened in the past three years,” Pradhan says. The increasingly deadly conflict has claimed more than 4,000 lives in the last three years alone. With the monarchy, political parties and the Maoists locked in a three-way fierce struggle for supremacy, the violence could easily get worse and with it, the problem of child labour.
The desperate children who are forced to leave their homes and schools take up any job, however hazardous, giving rise not only to exploitation but also risking their lives.
About 32,000 Nepalese children are currently working in 1,600 stone quarries, with only 30 per cent of those registered with the government, found a study conducted by another NGO, Concern for Children and Environment-Nepal (CONCERN).
The ILO, however, says more than 10,000 children work in stone quarries, coal, sand, and red soil mines in Nepal, the majority of them aged 11 to 13. Most are young girls. According to the ILO’s International Programme for the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC), 127,000 children in Nepal are working in mining and other hazardous situations it calls “the worst form of labour.” Sunday, June 12, is the ILO’s World Day Against Child Labour.
The conflict has led to an increase in child domestic workers, said Pracha Vasuprast, deputy project manager at the ILO-IPEC Nepal office, speaking at a programme on child domestic workers in Kathmandu on Friday. “In my country Thailand, you have to be very rich to have a child domestic help.” In the Hindu kingdom’s urban areas, children work in homes for as little as Rs400 a month (plus meals) and toil from 5 am to 11pm in some households. “Lack of awareness is contributing to the increase,” Vasuprast says.
The result of all these factors is that the number of child labourers in Nepal, ages 5-14 now stands at 2.6 million, according to CWIN.
Another problem is that the armed conflict has severely affected the outreach programmes of ILO-IPEC and its partners, resulting in the rise of internally displaced persons (IDPs), says Yadav Amatya, a senior adviser with IPEC. “Inaccessibility is yet another problem and we face difficulties in locating families of child labourers,” he told IPS. CWIN’s Pradhan warns that with child traffickers on the prowl for vulnerable children, the situation could go out of hand. Sexual exploitation is increasing, CWIN data shows.
As a first step to minimise such problems, Amatya suggests the government must move to protect vulnerable children. All sides to the conflict must also recognise schools as zones of peace, and donors should provide programmes and other support. “We need generous foreign aid to address the problem,” he added. In the meantime, children in Nepal will continue to slog it out day after day to provide a living for themselves and their families.—Dawn/IPS News Service
Are these budgets poor PR exercises?
WHAT is the relationship between the common man and the federal and provincial budgets? One asks this odd question keeping into account other factors. What is the comprehension of the common man when it comes to the complexities and the information explosion that the budget document contains? Also bear in mind the common man’s interest in official matters related primarily to the impact that they have on his daily life.
Of course budgets impact daily lives, but from the look of budget speeches and their high sounding theories and permutation of figures, as expounded and elaborated by a plethora of experts and economists on the media one has the nagging feeling that these budgets are losing their ability to communicate with the masses. If on the one hand they are described as pseudo public relations exercises, on the other hand they are also being dubbed as deceptive academic exercise. It is amazing how much television coverage is given to the budget theme, before and after the budget has been presented. One wonders whether any effort has been made to find out the extent to which these budget speeches and discussions are viewed by the man on the street — by the middle class to be precise. Having made this reference to the middle class, instantly bring me to the subject of the federal budget wherein big cars (1800cc type) have been made cheaper as the taxes have been brought down. This means, quite naturally, that those who buy them will be happy. But as one disenchanted Karachite opined, “Who will buy these cheaper and bigger cars — the feudal class and the industrialists or those with black money?”
Indeed the federal budget has once again made one wonder not only about any direct benefit provided to the common man in the year that lies ahead, but also why no adequate explanation has been provided for the fact that small cars have not been made cheaper.
But let me return to the theme of the federal and provincial budgets and the fact that public interest in them has steadily decline over the years. Why has it happened, we talked about this during the week. One student of economics pointed out that the governments had realized the political risk that they took when they include and impose taxes and duties in the budget, which had a direct bearing on the common man vis-a-vis the prices of essential food stuffs, and utilities and so on. Now the budget planners have come up with strategies that leave the budget document free of such minus points. The tariffs and prices that need to hit the common man, and enhance the political liability of the government of the day, are shrewdly and deliberately kept out of the budgets. These are affected nevertheless by various government organizations, and public and semi-public sector institutions, which spread out their umbrella throughout the year at times.
In the case of petrol and petroleum products, this is done every fortnight, underlined one housewife, who then added that no relief had been provided in the budgets when it came to the domestic budget. In fact she referred to the news reports that the gas and electricity tariffs were to be raised very shortly. When I read this in the newspaper I was reminded of a car driver whom I had asked about the Budget 2005-2006. His answer was spontaneous “The KESC tariff, the gas rates, and the atta price are the same. What relief has the budget brought to the poor. The poor remains poor.” (He forgot that at times the poor in this society get poorer still) Budget and relief? Is that possible? Isn’t that asking for too much? It is a misplaced expectation in a way. Budgets are necessary and remain official exercises that governments dutifully carry out. There is a kind of traditional hope that goes with it…there were days when newspapers carried highlights of what prices went up, and where they went down.
Now as one Karachiite pointed out the prices were so manipulated that they did not get into budgets. That is a political blunder. For instance, price rises whenever various organizations regard that as necessary. And when this happens, governments take the stance that they have nothing or little to do with these increases.
Let me return to the big cars becoming cheaper angle. There are also those who find that the smaller cars will now cost more as indeed will daily living regardless of what the financial wizards will want you to believe.