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Business News/ Politics / Policy/  Kailash Satyarthi, the children’s man
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Kailash Satyarthi, the children’s man

A look at the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize winner's fight against child and bonded labour, trafficking, modern slavery and other social evils

After winning the Nobel, Kailash Satyarthi told his team that the award had increased their responsibilities. Photo: Joerg Boethling/AlamyPremium
After winning the Nobel, Kailash Satyarthi told his team that the award had increased their responsibilities. Photo: Joerg Boethling/Alamy

New Delhi: In the autumn of 1995, a team of seven social activists raided a small loom unit in the Mirzapur-Bhadohi carpet-making belt of India. It was a routine exercise. Led by 41-year-old “bhaisaab", (roughly, brother) the team had in the past often raided carpet loom units employing children in Uttar Pradesh. It knew what it would find: a poorly lit, barely ventilated windowless hall with as many as 30 children at the looms, working 16-18-hour days, seven days a week. If the children slept more than permitted by their employers, they would be beaten, even branded with hot irons and cigarette butts.

The team would rescue the children, hand them back to their parents, and then look for a dhaba or a roadside eatery to get some food.

Bhaisaab, as Kailash Satyarthi, the joint winner of this year’s Peace Nobel, is known within his group, would usually forget to eat when on mission, recalls Rakesh Senger, secretary, Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA, save childhood movement), a non-governmental organization (NGO) run by Satyarthi with 100 members across India and which claims to have rescued 83,525 children from exploitative work conditions.

On that autumn evening in 1995, the team wasn’t having any lunch at a dhaba. Every dhaba it stopped at employed children, says Senger.

“If you keep on buying things made by child slaves in such conditions, you are equally responsible for the perpetration of slavery," Satyarthi is fond of saying. Finally late at night, the team was able to find a dhaba run by an old woman that didn’t employ children.

Dinner was served.

Satyarthi has shot into the limelight following his Nobel. Just about everyone is asking, “Who is Kailash Satyarthi?".

And it is likely that this newspaper wouldn’t be carrying his profile if not for the prize, although Satyarthi is no stranger to it (he wrote a stirring op-ed on child labour for it a few years ago).

On 10 October, the day the prize was announced, he first found out about it through a Gmail notification.

He still wasn’t sure, though.

“He asked us to check again if he had been awarded or whether the committee just wanted his comments," says Satyarthi’s wife, Sumedha Kailash, 59, who runs a rehabilitation centre for rescued children in Jaipur.

“It is a great honour for hundreds of millions of children living in slavery in modern India and for all the Indians who work for their rescue," Satyarthi, 60, said in an interview, days after the announcement.

Mahatma Gandhi should have got the award, he says, echoing the comments of the prize committee that regretted not giving the Peace Nobel to the man who led India’s independence movement and introduced the world to non-violent means of protest.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee considered 278 candidates for this year’s peace prize. “The process is so secretive that we had no idea about who was nominated or what followed. I knew he would get it (eventually) but wasn’t sure when," says his daughter Asmita, a business student who uses only one name.

Satyarthi, who says “children are his religion", first became popular for his sustained raid and rescue operations targeting carpet loom units. Between April 1995 and March 1996, Indian carpet exports earned $656 million, with the largest portion ($225 million) coming from the US, according to a report titled Debt Bondage, Carpet-Making, and Child Slavery by Swathi Mehta of Tufts University.

India has 65 million bonded child labourers, and 300 million adult labourers living in various forms of modern slavery, according to the Bonded Labour Liberation Front (BLLF).

A 2014 report by the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, written by adjunct faculty member Siddharth Kara, documents over 3,200 cases across nine states in India and finds several hundred cases of forced, bonded labour, child labour, and trafficking at carpet factories run by exporters who ship these rugs to some of the biggest retail stores in the US.

An electrical engineer by training, Satyarthi taught at a college in Bhopal after completing his studies in his hometown of Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh. He decided to shift to New Delhi in 1977 and soon began working with a publisher of Arya Samaj literature. He also started a magazine, Sangharsh Jaari Rahega (the struggle will continue), where he doubled up as the owner and a photo-journalist. His subjects were common people—roadside vendors, rickshaw pullers, beggars on the streets. Satyarthi says he always wanted to work towards abolishing social evils but realized that writing about these issues wasn’t enough. It was the time to act.

In 1980, he began working with Bandhua Mukti Morcha (BLLF), an organization headed by Swami Agnivesh. Agnivesh says Satyarthi was his most trusted companion for some time. The two together worked to free bonded labourers in the brick kilns of Haryana.

Then, they fell out. “Swami groomed Satyarthi. But Swami was more focused on Arya Samaj work while Satyarthi wanted to work exclusively on child labour," says Lenin Raghuvanshi, a Dalit rights activist who worked with Satyarthi after he formed his own organization, BBA, in 1980, to campaign for child rights and put an end to trafficking.

Child labour has been illegal in India since 1933 and the Constitution stipulates that no child below the age of 14 years shall be employed to work in any factory or mine or engage in any other hazardous employment. The Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976, strictly outlaws all forms of debt bondage and forced labour.

Yet, India has the world’s largest number of modern-day slaves, estimated at between 13.3 million and 14.7 million, according to the first Index of Global Slavery compiled by the Perth-based Walk Free Foundation in 2013. Ten nations, including India, together account for the highest numbers of enslaved people—76% of the worldwide 29.8 million estimated to be in slavery.

Within a few years of launching BBA, Satyarthi led the Global March Against Child Labour, a worldwide coalition of civil society groups and trade unions from 125 countries. He was the chairperson of the South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude (SACCS), an active coalition of more than 200 NGOs working on child rights issues in various industries in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. The organization claimed that by 1996, it had rescued more than 34,000 children by conducting raids at carpet-manufacturing units.

“Such work isn’t a popular investment in today’s world. His work has been awarded and it is a time of celebration for all of us fighting for the cause. But this is also a recognition that our child labour situation is now a global embarrassment," says Jayakumar Christian, chief executive officer and national director, World Vision India.

In the past, World Vision used a so-called buy-back method of freeing slaves (pay slaveholders a fee for the release of each child), instead of rescuing them.

“In 1980, there was no awareness of the problem. A law had been enacted banning child labour, but received no more than four or five line articles in newspapers," Satyarthi had said in an October 1994 interview with Multinational Monitor, a US magazine.

In the early years, Satyarthi recalls, he was shocked to find a member of the state assembly in Solund, Uttar Pradesh, who was a bonded labourer. “We went to his house to meet him and asked someone working on the roof if we could speak with the MLA (member of the legislative assembly). The labourer did not reply; he asked us to speak with his master first. When we met the master and asked about meeting the MLA, the master said, ‘You already met him. He was the person cleaning the roof,’" he says.

In 1993, Satyarthi began a campaign to inform consumers how carpets were made using child labour. The campaign was initiated by European and Asian rights groups such as the Indo-German Export Promotion Project, representatives of the carpet industry, 200 NGOs under the SACCS and Unicef India. “When consumers were made aware of how their carpets were produced, they demanded child labour-free carpets," Satyarthi says.

A year later, Satyarthi developed a self-certified “child labour-free" label for South Asian carpets. The trademark was called Rugmark. “We did not support a ban on carpets, or a ban on products produced in India or Pakistan. Rather, we decided to move in a more positive direction, trying to find ways and means to shift labour in the industry from children to adults," Satyarthi said in the Multinational Monitor interview.

Unsurprisingly, Satyarthi has been accused of playing to Western interests. “Why is it that India, the media here, never knew of him? Are we suggesting the country has been unfair to him?," asks former Samata Party leader and social activist Jaya Jaitley. “When you look at how he has been supported by the foreign powers or awarded by them, you see he gets his recognition from outside India."

He is not someone “who represented this movement against child labour single-handedly,"she adds.

Satyarthi and his team have also had to contend with opposition of a more immediate and physical nature.

During a raid on the Great Roman Circus, employing trafficked teenaged girls from Nepal as dancers, he was beaten up with rods and bamboo sticks. The circus owner even pointed a revolver at Satyarthi. However, the team rescued 13 girls.

In 2013, it was the NGO’s intervention in the form of a public interest litigation that led the Supreme Court to direct police to compulsorily register all cases of missing children. The police agencies have also installed a child tracking system to monitor the movement of minors hired by placement agencies.

In the last one year, 82,101 children have gone missing across India. Over half of them, or 48,688 are from West Bengal while 17,758 are from Uttar Pradesh, according to government figures. Between 2009 and 2011, 236,014 children went missing, and of these, 75,808 remain untraced, according to National Crime Records Bureau data.

Stricter laws against child trafficking is another focus area for Satyarthi. He is among a handful of child rights activists who have been instrumental in the ratification of the 1986 enactment of the Child Labour Act by the Indian Parliament and the 1999 ILO (International Labour Organization) Convention 182 on the elimination of the worst forms of child labour. The ILO Convention 182 was adopted after the Global March Against Child Labour.

In 2013, only 3,940 cases were registered under the generic description of human trafficking, according to NCRB data. Mumbai-based philanthropic organization Dasra, along with organizations such as the UK’s The Hummingbird Trust and Japan’s Kamonohashi Project, finds that as many as 40% of trafficked girls in the sex trade are adolescents and 15% are below the age of 15.

“The award will further reinforce global efforts to uphold children’s rights and motivate organizations and people relentlessly working to ensure that our children have a bright future without having to face violation of their basic rights," says Soha Moitra, regional director—north, Child Rights and You.

For many of Satyarthi’s contemporaries, the Nobel peace prize is an award for the cause, not necessarily the person. “It is a message to the government that children’s issues cannot be ignored anymore," says Rishikant, an activist with anti-trafficking NGO Shakti Vahini. “The prize has brought this issue to everyone’s attention. Satyarthi has dedicated his life to protecting children, and hopefully this award will make his fight easier."

Back at the BBA office in Delhi’s Kalkaji, the news and excitement are palpable. The day after the announcement, Satyarthi held a staff meeting that lasted less than half-an-hour. He told his team that its responsibilities had increased, and the job would be so much more difficult than before. “I have been working for more than two years and we keep complaining about not being paid well and how our work isn’t highlighted," says Swati Jha, who works at BBA. “Bhaisaab would always tell us to work, regardless of the results."

The Peace Nobel was a result of that work.

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Published: 14 Oct 2014, 11:50 PM IST
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