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By Shelley Seale Ashikul Islam and Sahiful Mondal are child labourers who today live at Muktaneer, a home for destitute boys in Kolkata. They are the lucky ones who found a refuge and rehabilitation, and went on to make an award-winning film. There are over 44 million child labourers in India
In 2004, a very small-budget independent film called I Am created a stir worldwide. It was awarded a Grand Prize at the International Children’s Film Festival in Athens, grabbed the attention of the Australian press where it ran as a major story in The Age newspaper, and was even featured on the Oprah Winfrey show. I Am is no ordinary movie. Besides the fact that it was made entirely by children -- directed by Ashikul Islam, filmed by Sahiful Mondal, and starring only children -- the young award-winning filmmakers are all residents of a home for destitute boys in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), India. These boys have all come a long way from their early childhoods. Sahiful was put into indentured slave labour at the age of four, after his father died of tuberculosis. With their mother suffering from a mental illness, it fell to this tiny boy and his siblings to somehow put food into their mouths. Sahiful’s first job was agricultural work, crushing hard earth with a brick; this backbreaking task earned him the equivalent of 20 cents a day. Due to the seasonal nature of the job, in the off-season he was put to work tending goats from sunrise to sunset. For this he earned two portions of rice a day. Once, when he lost a goat under his watch, his employer beat him and refused him food for two days. Today, Sahiful’s life is very different. Rescued at the age of six and brought to Muktaneer, which means ‘Open Sky’ in Hindi, his life was freed from exploitation. At Muktaneer he began receiving four good meals a day, was given his own bed, and was allowed to play for the first time in his life. He began attending school and his family was also provided assistance. “Before I lived here, I didn’t study, I didn’t go to school,” Sahiful told me when I visited Muktaneer in March 2007. “Since I came here, I can go to school. I learned about photo and film. Swapan gave me a camera, and I took one photo, and from there I learned all about filmmaking. It was my dream to make a movie.” Sahiful’s background is a common story at Muktaneer where most of the boys endured slave labour conditions or were kidnapped and sold. Muktaneer is an initiative of the Centre for Communication and Development (CCD), founded in 1978 to assist vulnerable children. Swapan Mukherjee is the secretary of CCD, which initially focused on education. Then, in 1995, an explosion at a Kolkata fireworks factory killed 23 children who were working there illegally. The factory employed only children -- 1,500 of them who worked from 6 am to 6 pm for an average weekly wage of Rs 65, about $ 1.50. The explosion rocked the entire area; trees were uprooted and concrete pillars along with children’s bodies were tossed into the air to land in a nearby pond. The factory-owners were not fined for employing illegal child labour. Nor were they charged with the children’s deaths, or unsafe working conditions. Mukherjee was outraged. “The factory refused all responsibility for the tragedy,” he tells me, disbelief still in his voice 12 years later. Ultimately, Mukherjee himself took the factory-owners to court and won a judgment for compensation to all the victims’ families. “From there we moved to a focus on child protection and safety,” he says. As the work continued, Mukherjee contacted Amnesty International, Equality Now and other human rights organisations for assistance. In 2000, the Muktaneer Children’s Home was opened for children who do not have a home to return to, or whose families are too poor to care for them. Since then, CCD has been integral in bringing 54 child traffickers before the courts for prosecution and has rescued around 2,000 children from a horrific array of abusive situations, including mutilation by begging networks to make them more effective at soliciting alms. As Mukherjee investigated these incidents, he also photographed and filmed the children’s conditions, their lives and their “rescues” as records for proof and documentation. “The children were fascinated by the camera,” he says. “They wanted to document their own lives, tell their own stories.” And so their dreams were born. Although Sahiful’s dreams came true, another 12-100 million child labourers in India may never get such a chance. Circumstances like those Ashikul was plucked out of -- child trafficking, indentured servitude, factory labour, and the sex trade -- comprise an “industry” that huge numbers of children fall victim to, disappearing into an underground world. The conditions these children are forced into amount to slavery, 200 years after legislation was passed making the practice illegal. And this is slavery at its ugliest, most evil core; slavery of the most vulnerable among us: children. There’s a very simple, yet horrific reason why there are such large numbers of child labourers and prostitutes: children are cheap commodities. They cost less than cattle; a cow or buffalo costs an average of Rs 20,000, but a child can be bought and traded like an animal for between Rs 500 and Rs 2,000. They can be paid the least, exploited the most, and, because of their largely invisible status, have virtually no power against their oppressors. While factories in China and Central America that exploit children are often in the news, India is the biggest example of a country plagued by this human rights abuse, with the highest number of child labourers in the world. Official estimates of their number vary greatly, often by definition of who these children are. The Unicef website reports 12.6 million children engaged in hazardous occupations, but the figure is according to the official 2001 census. Because more than half of all children born in India are never registered and no records are kept on child workers, it may safely be assumed that this number is extremely low. The official Indian government figure, based on a 1984 labour ministry survey, is 44 million. At the other end of the spectrum, Human Rights Watch puts the figure at between 60 and 115 million, and Global March Against Child Labour contends that as many as 100 million children work “under conditions akin to slavery,” with an estimated 15 million in bonded servitude. Bonded labour is defined as child labour in which children are indentured in order to pay off debts. Few sources of traditional credit or bank loans exist for those living in poverty. The earnings of bonded children are less than the interest on these informal loans, ensuring that they will typically never be able to pay off the debt. Thus, they become, in effect, slaves of their “employers”. Often families themselves place children in such conditions when they feel they have no choice. Many unsophisticated parents fall prey to promises by recruiters that their children will be given light work to do, go to school, be exposed to more opportunities in the city, and send money back home. They’re even told the child will have better marriage possibilities. Living in poor rural villages without many prospects, these families believe their children will have better futures. The reality, however, is that many of these children are virtually enslaved, abused, and send very little if any money home. A recent study by Save The Children found that most child domestic workers toil for up to 15 hours a day, with little break, for less than US$ 12 a month. Half of them are given no leave at all, and 37% never see their families again. Extensive research in the Kolkata area by Save The Children found that 68% of child domestic workers suffered physical abuse, and nearly 90% had been victims of sexual abuse. In 2001, an 11-year-old domestic worker burst from her “master’s” home, her little body ablaze, after he set her on fire. A neighbour put the fire out with palm mats and the girl was taken to hospital where she later died. A royal couple in another district brought an eight-year-old orphan boy into their palace compound to work; he was later rescued, suffering from malnutrition and extreme injuries arising out of physical torture, including fractures and severe burn wounds. The boy told the authorities that he slept with the household dogs, and was once thrown from the palace roof. Last year, there was the highly publicised case of a 10-year-old domestic worker in Mumbai who was murdered by her affluent employers. The girl, Sonu, was reported as a suicide to the police who arrived at the suburban home to find her body hanging from a ceiling fan. Further investigation revealed that Sonu had been beaten and then left to bleed to death by her mistress. Her crime? She had been caught by the employer’s daughter trying on lipstick at the dressing table. When the truth emerged it caused an uproar in the media. Sonu became a sort of poster child against domestic child labour and possibly spurred an October 2006 legislation that extended the child labour ban to domestic, hotel and restaurant work. Om Prakash Gurjar is an inspiring example of a former child labourer who is now working to effect change for other children. Once a bonded labourer working in the fields to repay his grandfather’s debt, Om Prakash was rescued by activists and taken to live at Bal Ashram, a rehabilitation centre for working children. In school, the teenage boy quickly rose to being first in his class and got involved in cricket and theatre. Back in his home village, Om Prakash single-handedly implemented the Bal Mitra Gram programme to make the village child-labour-free. In 2006, he was honoured with the world’s most prestigious award for children -- the International Children’s Peace Prize. Om Prakash travelled to the Netherlands to receive the award from former South African President F W De Klerk. “I will work to support the families of child labourers,” he says, “so that children can go to school and enjoy their childhood.” (Shelley Seale is a freelance writer based in Austin, Texas. She is researching a book titled The Weight of Silence: Invisible Children of India on India’s 25 million orphans) InfoChange News & Features, June 2007
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