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Nepal’s Kamaiyas are free, but will it last?
In July, the Government of Nepal outlawed bonded labour in Nepal, declaring the practice illegal, ordering bonded labourers freed immediately from any debt and written or oral contracts with landlords, and mandating 3 to 10 year prison terms for anyone who continued the practice. That would seem major progress, and it is. But for the ex-Kamaiya, the challenge is sustaining their freedom.
SURYAPATUWA, Nepal - In western Nepal, a bumpy, 40-minute ride from this Bardiya District capital through fertile paddy fields, leads to the home of Jung Bahadur and his wife, Asha Tharu who've recently arrived in the twenty-first century.
Until July of this year, many families here, including Jung Bahadur's, were Kamaiya, or bonded labourers, living a miserable life, working night and day for a landlord, or Zamindar. Then in July, the Government freed them, ending a practice that has kept thousands of local farmers and their families in poverty and debt for decades.
"We are very happy about this change and are trying to meet as many other Kamaiyas as possible to persuade them to quit," Jung Bahadur told a recent visitor. "Now, I can save money - there's no need to borrow anymore."
Freedom, but can a caged bird learn to fly?
On the face of it, it would seem that Jung Bahadur and his fellow Kamaiya are a success story in finding an end to an archaic practice and providing decent work to people who could only dream before of earning their own livelihood. And in some ways, it is.
Jung Bahadur was in fact one of the lucky few who, even before the government decree, had managed to pay off his debt of Rs 10,000 (about $140) by earning extra cash from carpentry and casual agricultural work. Now the family is free to make its own choices about how to run their lives. His wife Asha works in the kitchen garden and raises the children. Jung Bahadur owns a small piece of land (2 khatta or 0.07 hectare) and supplements his income through wage labour and carpentry.
But the acknowledged improvement in Kamaiya lives is not as clear cut as it seems. Some, like 51-year-old former Kamaiya Chun Budhiya, are too old to find other work, so he and his family continue working for the landlord in return for 4.5 quintal (450 kg) of paddy per year, plus food and a shelter. He does all types of work for the landlord, cutting grass for the animals, ploughing, planting, and irrigating, making him still dependent on the landlord despite his ex-Kamaiya status.
"Parrots who have been caged for too long have difficulties learning to fly," says an official of the Banke District Development Committee on the situation of the liberated Kamaiya.
The Kamaiya system
The Kamaiya system was prevalent in five districts of western Nepal, and mostly affected the Tharu ethnic group. Under it, a Kamaiya agreed to work for a Zamindar, under an oral contract for one year, receiving wages paid in kind in the form of a fixed quantity of paddy or a fixed portion of his production, or sometimes in cash. Often, his wife and children would also work for the landlord for little or no extra income.
Wages were rarely adequate, however, to meet the basic needs of the family, thus forcing the Kamaiya to take a loan from the landlord to meet social obligations like traditional festivities, or medical and other expenses. Debt service forced the Kamaiya to forfeit income. The Kamaiya were thus unable to free themselves from the spiral of poverty and debt, which was transferred from one generation to the next.
The Kamaiya system probably existed for five decades, evolving as farmers migrated from hills to lower land. Though they tilled the land, the farmers - mostly Tharu - had no legal rights to ownership. When the state awarded many civil servants, army personnel and royal personages large plots of land in the 1960s, the Tharu found themselves evicted and ultimately dependent on the landlords.
A recent survey indicates there are over 7,000 ex-Kamaiya families in the Bardiya District of which around 3,000 have no home and no land of their own. The government is identifying state-owned land for redistribution to these families, giving priority to those without homes. The hope is to provide sufficient land for families to be able to produce enough for their own subsistence needs so that the children will have a better life than that of a farm labourer.
But land alone is not enough; also needed are education, health services and alternative employment opportunities for the adults. Empowerment of ex-Kamaiyas is essential if they are to escape falling again into other forms of exploitative labour.
Global report
Under the Follow-Up to the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, a Global Report is produced by the Director-General each year for discussion at the International Labour Conference. The topic for the Global Report in 2001 is the elimination of all forms of forced or compulsory labour. The Report will be launched prior to the 89th Session of the ILC in June 2001. Its findings and the discussion at Conference will be used in the drafting of paper for the November 2001 Session of the Governing Body, on priorities and action plans for technical cooperation on the elimination of forced labour.
Support needed
The government Ministry of Land Reform and Management has drawn up a proposal for the rescue and rehabilitation of the emancipated Kamaiyas, but needs the support of donor agencies for its implementation.*
The ILO InFocus Programme on Promoting the Declaration, and the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) have come together to design a project on the Sustainable Elimination of Bonded Labour in Nepal, with US$3.5 million funding from the US Department of Labor, and which will be implemented by the Nepal Government and nongovernmental agencies, including workers' and employers' organizations.The Project builds upon achievements of IPEC's earlier projects aiming specifically at the elimination of child bonded labour in Nepal.
The new project recognizes bonded children as part of Kamaiya bonded families, and thus adopts an integrated approach to tackling a range of problems faced by poverty-stricken households in western Nepal. Key elements include strengthening the capacity of the Government, the social partners and NGOs to support effective rehabilitation of former Kamaiya families, including enforcement of minimum agricultural wages; awareness-raising and advocacy on fundamental principles and rights at work, and ILO Conventions including the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention, 1999 (No. 182); assisting the reintegration of Kamaiya families into their communities; and providing appropriate, highquality education to former Kamaiya children through mainstreaming them into schools or giving them non-formal and vocational training.
The project will collaborate closely with the ILO Social Finance Unit's (SFU) sub-regional project on combating debt bondage through microfinance schemes, which covers Nepal as well as Bangladesh, India and Pakistan.
In these four countries, the SFU project aims at facilitating access to alternative sources of credit, savings and insurance for a population at risk of becoming bonded in the first place or relapsing into debt bondage after being freed. The strategy is to break the (quasi-) monopoly of the employer as a money-lender in the local market in order to discontinue this linkage between the labour and capital "market". Since bonded labour is made up of a complex web of relations which are not exclusively financial, complementary support will also be organized in the areas of sensitization, education, primary health care, income-generating activities, group organizations, and social empowerment.
*This project is part of the Social Finance Unit's Bondage Eradication Standards and Tools (BEST) programme to make debt bondage a thing of the past.