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Forgotten Children


Reports of governmental and non-governmental agencies present a very appalling picture of child labor in Nepal. There are thousands of children—I call them ‘forgotten children’—working as domestic workers hidden behind mansion walls. These are the children who experience little or no childhood at all.

Leela is a ten-years-old servant in one of the houses in Kathmandu. Every morning at 5:30 she gets up, trudges out to a nearby public tap to fetch water for her master's household, sweeps the yard and then prepares tea for the whole family. Then she helps prepare the family’s meals, runs errands and washes dishes and clothes. When the whole family has taken the meals, then only she can have her turn. If something goes wrong from her side, she is beaten and even tortured.

Leela is one of the most forgotten children, a domestic worker hidden behind mansion walls. Like her, thousands of children are exploited in our societies. With a dream of a bright future, these kids are sent by their families to work as domestic workers. But once there, these kids have the hardest times. A natural right of a child to live with his /her parents and live a very playful life is violated. They are children but without childhood.

But domestic servitude is only one of the areas where thousands of children are exploited for their work. They are employed as cheap laborers in garment factories, carpet production, and in farms with minimal or no pay at all.  Many times, they are forced into prostitution. And the number of child laborers is increasing.

Poverty plays an enormous role in the phenomenon of child labor. Poor families are forced to push even young children to work to increase the family's overall income. And mired in poverty and scarcity, the working class children don’t have enough time to attend school. Even when they get time the work often leaves them without the energy to study effectively. Moreover, the children who are mistreated in the workplace may be so traumatized that they cannot concentrate in school and study.

These children thus grow up uneducated and unprepared for the future. Sitting cooped up in factories for more than 8 hours a day or working as a domestic servant in their early age, these children get very little chance to learn reading, writing, or how the larger world works or how to contribute to society.

Rhetoric aside, in Nepal, government does not seem to have taken any practical steps in this area. Responding to ILO Convention 182 to eliminate the worst forms of child labor, a new legislation came into force in Nepal stating that children under the age of 16 are not allowed to work in certain jobs that are unsafe.  But what could a mere promulgation of law do?

It is one of the exigencies to address the issue of child exploitation while imagining a new Nepal. Let us wage a war on child exploitation; let us work together so that not a single child is deprived of the natural rights; let us be witness to the smile in every child’s face. 


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