Govind grew up with his family in Nepal, but after his father’s death, and having worked as a slave for two years in his home country, he came to the Indian border at age 11. With nothing to eat, his only goal was to find work. Soon, he began to fix phones and take care of customers in a small phone business, but his new job was as bad as the previous one; his boss beat him, did not pay him, and he could not leave the store even at night.
Fortunately, Govind was able to escape the cycle of slavery and extreme poverty. “One day I saw a children’s demonstration going by. They were part of the Global March against Child Labour. They held a meeting in the courtyard just behind the phone store. One man was telling people how he had been freed from the carpet industry. He seemed like a good person and I thought that maybe he could help me. ‘Take me with you, my boss is not good to me. If I go back now, he’ll beat me’, I said. I was accepted.”
Kailash has spent 25 years rescuing children from jobs where, in the best of cases, they get measly wages and frequently suffer all kinds of abuse. He insists that the underlying problem is far from being solved despite being ‘rescued’. The financial hardships of families forces them to give their children to middlemen who travel across the country offering loans between 10 and 20 Euros to the needy in exchange for their children’s work. They take the children, place them in businesses, and the families never see their children again nor the promised money. The children live in appalling conditions, like animals. They work 15 hours a day and eat and sleep on the job site,” says Kailash.
The release of hundreds of child slaves in India are not isolated cases in a country where 17.5 million children work, according to UNICEF. As an example, a raid on Mumbai was meticulously planned for weeks. Several organizations located businesses where children worked in broad daylight. Some 150 officers combed 200 shops in a downtown neighborhood. With the arrival of the police, business owners ordered the boys to run away, while others were forced to hide in basements and attics. The operation ended with the arrest of 42 businessmen and the release of 450 children between 6 and 14.
The rescued children, many of them with symptoms of malnutrition, went back to their families, whom they had not seen for years. Most of the children come from the poorer states in India and neighboring Nepal. The organizations have appealed to the Indian government to support needy families so that their children do not end up in the hands of traffickers again.
Source: blogia.com
