The terms Child Labor and child workers were used
throughout the original article but have been changed. It
is important to emphasize these are expressions that can hardly be read in this
blog. Language is a very important manipulative tool used by the oppressors to get
people to accept the unacceptable, the unnatural, the abhorrent and, in this
case, to create the impression that we are talking about working children. There
are 400 million children forced into
agricultural work, the textile industry, the mining industry, wars,
prostitution, debt servitude, serfdom… and the list of atrocities is endless.
They are not working children, they are CHILD SLAVES!
A young coal miner studied
English during a break in Khliehriat, India. The few nearby schools teach in
local dialects.
By GARDINER HARRIS
Published: February 25, 2013
The New York Times
KHLIEHRIAT, India — After
descending 70 feet on a wobbly bamboo staircase into a dank pit, the teenage
miners ducked into a black hole about two feet high and crawled 100 yards
through mud before starting their day digging coal.
They wore T-shirts, pajama-like pants and
short rubber boots — not a hard hat or steel-toed boot in sight. They tied rags
on their heads to hold small flashlights and stuffed their ears with cloth. And
they spent the whole day staring death in the face.
Just two months before full implementation
of a landmark 2010 law mandating that all Indian children between the ages of 6
and 14 be in school, some 28 million are child slaves instead, according to Unicef.
Child slaves can be found everywhere — in shops, in kitchens, on farms, in
factories and on construction sites. In the coming days Parliament may consider
yet another law to ban child slavery, but even activists say more laws, while welcome, may do little to solve
one of India’s most intractable problems.
Poverty, corruption, decrepit schools and
absentee teachers are among the causes, and there is no better illustration of
the problem than the Dickensian “rathole” mines here in the state of Meghalaya.
Meghalaya lies in India’s isolated
northeast, a stump of land squashed between China, Bhutan, Bangladesh and
Myanmar. Its people are largely tribal and Christian, and they have languages,
food and facial features that seem as much Chinese as Indian.
Suresh Thapa, 17, said that he has worked
in the mines near his family’s shack “since he was a kid,” and that he expects
his four younger brothers to follow suit. He and his family live in a tiny
tarp-and-stick shack near the mines. They have no running water, toilet or
indoor heating.
The presence of children in Meghalaya’s
mines is no secret. Suresh’s boss, Kumar Subba, said children work in mines
throughout the region.
“Mostly the ones who come are orphans,”
said Mr. Subba, who supervises five mines and employs 130 people who
collectively produce 30 tons of coal each day.
He conceded that working conditions inside
his and other mines in the region were dangerous. His mines are owned by a
state lawmaker, he said.
“People die all the time,” he said. “You
have breakfast in the morning, go to work and never come back. Many have died
this way.”
While the Indian government has laws
banning child slavery and unsafe working conditions, states are mostly charged
with enforcing those laws. The country’s police are highly politicized, so
crackdowns on industries sanctioned by the politically powerful are rare.
Police officers routinely extract bribes from coal truckers, making the
industry a source of income for officers.
“Child slavery is allowed to continue in
Meghalaya by those in positions of power and authority, as it is across India,”
said Shantha Sinha, chairwoman of the National
Commission for Protection of Child Rights.
In 2010, Impulse,
a nongovernmental organization based in Shillong, Meghalaya’s capital, reported
that it had found 200 children — some as young as 5 — working in 10 local
mines. The group estimated that as many as 70,000 children worked in about
5,000 mines.
Its findings led to images in the Indian
news media of small child slaves in horrifying conditions. State officials
angrily denied that there was any child slavery problem.
Investigations soon followed by the
National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, as well as the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, one
of the nation’s most respected independent research groups. Both confirmed the
presence of child slaves.
Despite visiting during the monsoon
season, when many mines are closed or barely operational, the Tata group found
343 children age 15 or younger enslaved in 401 mines and seven coal depots. The
group had intended to conduct a more extensive investigation, but the
“researchers had to stop data collection, as local interest groups threatened
them with bodily harm if they continued with the study,” the report noted.
“The mining industry is clearly aware of
the issue of child slavery and the illegality of the act, and yet children
continue to be enslaved,” the report concluded.
Bindo M. Lanong, Meghalaya’s deputy chief
minister for mining and geology, flatly denied the investigations’ findings.
“There is no child slave in Meghalaya,” he
said in a telephone interview this month. “These allegations are totally
absurd. They are not based on facts.”
Mr. Lanong also said that mines in
Meghalaya follow national safety regulations.
Yet, several mines visited in Meghalaya
had no ventilation and only one entrance; they followed no mining plan, did not
use limestone to reduce explosion risks and had minimal roof supports, among
other illegal and dangerous conditions. Their bamboo staircases were
structurally unsound and required miners to walk sideways to avoid falling.
Miners said those conditions were endemic.
Mr. Lanong responded: “What should we do,
stop mining? I ask those people if rathole mining is banned, you will be
interfering with the liberty of the landowners.”
Despite offering high pay, mine managers
nonetheless have trouble finding enough workers in this area, according to the
Tata report. The local tribal population largely shuns the jobs, so children
and other laborers are brought here from Nepal and Bangladesh in informal
networks that advocates have decried as trafficking. Many are soon trapped in a
classic swindle: although pay is high, mine operators charge huge premiums to
deliver drinking water, food and other staples to mining camps. As a result,
many child slaves are unable to send money home or earn enough to leave.
There are few schools near the mining
camps, and those that are available teach in local dialects — languages that
immigrant children generally do not speak. So even if they want to get
educated, many children cannot.
Wildcat mining has become so endemic in
the Jaintia Hills district of Meghalaya that much of the land resembles a
moonscape, denuded of trees and brush. Roads are choked with coal trucks, and
roadsides are covered with piles of black rocks. Mining has led “to a host of
issues such as subsidence, degradation of soil and water resources as well as
air pollution,” the Tata report stated.
But it has also brought money for those
who are from the region. Suresh said he earns $37 to $74 a week, a healthy
salary in a country where two-thirds of the population lives on less than $15
per week. He gives the money to his family, he said.
After lunch, Suresh got ready to return
underground. He said that he had seen people die, “but I haven’t had an
accident yet.”
“Well,” he amended, “I hurt my back once
when the mud fell in, but we still had to work the next day.”
“How can we not work?” he asked. “We have
to eat.”
Sruthi Gottipati contributed reporting from
Khliehriat, and Niharika Mandhana from New Delhi.
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