18 July 2000
Nepal bans bonded labour
The Nepalese
government on Monday banned the practice of bonded labour,
under which the
lower caste people work in large farms owned by upper caste land owners.
Anyone
violating the ban could be jailed up to 10 years.
Lower caste people have
worked as bonded labors for generations,
trying to pay off the debts incurred
by their fathers or grandfathers.
13
Years ago (almost to the day) the Nepalese government banned bonded labour – a
good thing – but simultaneously thousands of people were left homeless. The
government allocated land to many of these families and one of the communities
they chose for about 250 families, is the village of Shreelanka in the Kailali
District of western Nepal.
This
is good agricultural land, (the surrounds are green with paddy fields) but for
many years no one wanted to live here for three reasons: (1) Malaria and a lack
of medicine to combat it, (2) annual floods, and (3) snakes. And so it was in
Shreelanka that today we visited families that have once again been impacted by
floods. Last weekend the water burst the banks of the nearby river, drowned
their paddy and was three feet up their walls.
I
sit on a wooden ‘day bed’ in a mud/straw house where a family of eight live.
The eldest of four sisters is a sponsored child and is at school today for
extra tuition, the other sisters, two brothers and Mum and Dad tell us that they
know when the floods are coming now: if it has been raining hard a for a good
while in the mountains on the horizon they know it will not be long.
They
take the three beds in the single room house and stack them on top of the day
bed and pack all their belongings onto the tower they have created. They take
their two cows and move them to higher ground at the school. The kids move to
the school as well. Mum and Dad climb the tower and stay in the house, trying
to save as much as they can – for three days.
Today,
the water has receded from the houses but the area around the house is a muddy
swamp. (Some houses are still islands.) But their house is set-up again, Dad
has rebuilt the fire pit and the second eldest daughter is helping Mum fry some
vegetable for lunch. One side wall is completely destroyed by the flood, it is
closed in by pieces of plastic and cloth; about two feet of most of the other
walls has been eroded as well – but none of this can be repaired until after
September when the monsoon is over and they can buy straw.
Life
is tough for these families, but Mum and Dad smile as they tell us that they
would rather this: their freedom – the ability to choose what work they do and
who they do it for and the opportunity their kids now have to go to school and
maybe escape the area - to the life of servitude and bondage that was theirs
not all that long ago.
[On
the way out of the village our vehicle ‘fell’ into a deep hole created by the
floods and we had to trek out to the main road. It was quite a fun event for
the locals!]
