Children cheated out of life
Despite India’s economic growth, child labor remains widespread
patna, india » When the Nobel Committee announced that Indian children’s rights activist Kailash Satyarthi had won the Peace Prize, a skinny 13year-old boy was serving cups of milky tea to customers at a tea stall in eastern India.
By law, Raja Manjhi should not be working at all. But, like millions of children across India, he has been forced out of school and into a job to help his impoverished family.
Despite the country’s rapid economic growth, child labor remains widespread in India, where an estimated 13 million children work, with laws meant to keep kids in school and out of the workplace routinely flouted.
Satyarthi, 60, who won the Peace Prize on Friday along with 17-year-old Pakistani MalalaYousafzai, accepts that “a lot of work still remains” before children such as Raja no longer have to work.
Raja dropped out of school in second grade, when he was handed over to the owner of a tea stall in the eastern city of Patna to pay off his father’s 5,000 rupee, or $80, debt. Themoneywas needed because Raja’s mother was sick.
He has no idea what a Nobel Prize means. And he has no idea when his father’s debt will be repaid so he can go back to his village.
Across India, children — some
as young as 5 or 6 — work in all sorts of jobs. Many, like Raja, are in bonded labor, bound to their employers in exchange for a loan and unable to leave while in debt, which can last forever.
For more than three decades, Satyarthi and the Save the ChildrenMovement, an organization he founded, have worked to rescue children such as Raja and create awareness to keep others in school.
For the children, the issue is not as clear-cut as many outside India would think. They come from bitterly poor families and, in many cases, are their families’ sole breadwinners.
RohitKumar came to the northern Indian city of Lucknow two years ago when he was 11. His father worked at a construction site, while he worked at food stalls.
His father went back to their village last year, but Rohit stayed behind to work at a tea stall, where heworks up to 15 hours a day.
“I like this job,” he says, adding that it fetches him two meals a day and about 800 rupees, or $13, a month, moremoney than he has ever had in his life.