KATHMANDU, NEPAL – On the banks of the Aagra River in Dhading, a neighboring district of Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital, sits a small hut with a grass roof. There are no windows or airflow, just heaps of stones, big and small, piled in one corner.
Among these heaps stands 13-year-old Manita Magar with a hammer in her hand, ready to crush the stones into small pieces.
“I help my mother in her works because her income alone is not enough for subsistence,” she says as she reveals the boils and calluses covering her hands.
Her mother, Aruna Magar, goes out early every morning to collect stones near the riverbank, returning at 8 a.m. to prepare food for her children. Manita then gets to work crushing the stones.
She then helps her siblings to get ready before walking the half an hour to Janjagriti School, where she is in fifth grade. After school, she eats an afternoon snack if there is any food left and then is back to crushing stones.
“I want to go to school,” she says. “But then, I have to work to make our ends meet.”
The government provides free tuition in government schools until 10th grade. But students have to buy their own books and uniforms.
“We cannot afford school uniform and exercise books,” Manita says.
So Manita says she must work to help generate income for her family.
“My siblings are young,” Manita says. “My mother has to collect the stones and crush them. If I help her, we are able to crush 115 to 150 kilos [up to 330 pounds] of stones every day.”
She says this earns them 100 rupees ($1) to 200 rupees ($2) per day.
Originally from Baglung, a small town in western Nepal, Manita has been living in the hut on the banks of the Aagra River with her mother and her younger brother and sister for the past nine years. A flood destroyed the Magars’ home and land in Baglung in 1993. So Manita’s mother says that the family moved in 1995 to Dhading, where her husband and Manita’s father worked as a porter.
But then Magar's husband left her to marry another woman in the village in 2003. With no other alternative, Magar moved with her children to the banks of Aagra River, where she could support her children by crushing stone.
The same flood that had destroyed their home had also swept away the bridges over the Aagra, Belkhu and Malekhu rivers in Dhading. When the floodwaters receded, large stones littered the banks of the rivers. People from other districts of Nepal migrated to these banks to earn a living by crushing the stones to make material for the construction of buildings, roads, bridges and canals.
In addition to Manita’s struggle to balance school and crushing stone, her family lives under constant fear in the small hut. From March to May, they fear that storms might uproot their shelter. From May to July, they worry about the Aagra River overflowing and flooding their home.
“I have already lived half of my life,” Magar, 40, says. “Therefore, I do not fear death. But I have fear for my children. God’s will can never be known that while living on the banks of the river, we might be buried in the same grave.”
Childhood is nonexistent for the young girls who must balance school and work – or give up their studies altogether – to help support their families by crushing stones. Activists and union representatives say the government needs to do more to end child labor and improve wages for their parents. The government provides educational support to families of stone crushers and is working to implement a plan to eliminate child labor by 2020.
In Nepal, 2.14 million children are economically active, 21,000 of which are involved in hazardous labor such as crushing stone and working in brick kilns, coal mines and quarries, according to Nepal’s Ministry of Labour and Employment.
Children ages 5 to 9 make up one-quarter of the child labor population, according to the ministry. Half of child laborers are between ages 10 and 14, and one-quarter are between ages 15 to 17.
Lika Manita, Dhan Maya, 15, works as a stone crusher in Chovar in Kathmandu district to help her single mother support them. Dhan, an only child who hails from Phaparbari village in the Makwanpur district south of Kathmandu, has been working with her 65-year-old mother as a stone crusher since the age of 5, when her father’s death left them few other options.
But unlike Manita, Dhan didn’t get the chance to go to school.
“I always wanted to study, but my mother cannot afford to send me to school,” Dhan says. “Also, my mother has grown old and she cannot crush the stones much. Therefore, she works as a vendor, and I crush the stones.”
She says that her lack of education traps her in the same cycle of poverty that her mother has endured.
“We do not get the work we want, as we are illiterate,” she says. “So, we have to make a living crushing the stones.”
Dhan says that her mother earns 50 rupees to 150 rupees (60 cents to $1.80) per day working as a street vendor, whereas she crushes around 115 kilograms of stones every day and earns 100 rupees ($1). Their combined earnings are just enough to rent a room in Chovar and to buy food, Dhan says.
But families struggle to survive on the wage they earn from crushing stone because the minimum wage rate is not fixed for workers engaged in the informal sector or in untaxed, unmonitored economic activities, says Rajendra Kumar Basnet, a resident of Dhading and a social activist working for National Network on Right to Food, Nepal, a nongovernmental organization. The daily wage of workers has also not increased with the rise in cost of consumer goods.
A woman can earn approximately 100 rupees ($1) per day, whereas a man can make up to 300 rupees ($3.50) per day, Basnet says. Children receive lower wages despite performing the same work.
There is also no guarantee that stone crushers can find work every day, so families who earn a living this way must many times migrate for work. Technology also reduces the need for their work, as enterprising stone crushers introduced modern equipment such as excavators and dozers in 2003 to perform the task on a larger scale on the banks.
“The stones on the banks are used up, and the workers have to walk seven kilometers away to reach the place where they can crush the stones and make their living,” Basnet says of the 250 households living on the banks of Aagra River.
The government of Nepal has no statistical information on the situation of the workers who have been living on the banks of the Aagra River, Basnet says. But he estimates that more than 400 schoolchildren are working as stone crushers in the area to support their families.
The number of child laborers is increasing, yet the working conditions are worsening, Basnet says. Of those that go to school, most go to class hungry or survive solely on chiura, beaten rice flakes.
Political parties use these child laborers in their election campaigns by promising to improve their situations, and labor unions use them for their protests and demonstrations, he says. But these children have received no benefit.
“It is very important for the government to focus on this matter,” he says.
Smriti Lama, secretary for the Central Union of Painters, Plumbers, Electro and Construction Workers – Nepal, a Nepali trade union, agrees.
“It is very important to eliminate child labor from Nepal,” she says.
Young children often end up working in the riskier jobs, she says. Employers hire children rather than teenagers because they can pay them less and can chide them more easily.
“Children do not choose to become child labor,” Lama says. “Their economic conditions force them to.”
Neither governmental nor nongovernmental agencies are doing enough, she says. She says they should direct awareness programs about the hazards of child labor at the sources of child labor – the employers.
“It is very important that the government and the nongovernment agencies and all other stakeholders to work together to end child labor,” Lama says.
Tulasi Shiwakoti, chairman for the Bagmati zone’s subcommittee of the General Federation of Nepalese Trade Unions, the largest trade union confederation in the country, says a lack of funding makes it difficult for the federation to help the children much.
“Due to the economic crisis in the country, there has not been much work done for such children regarding their education and essential skills,” Shiwakoti says. “We want to change the condition of the child labor and work for their betterment, but due to lack of funds, we have not been able to do anything tangible.”
The government provides more than 700 children of the parents working as stone crushers and domestic laborers with books, notebooks and school uniforms through high school in 15 different districts of Nepal, Shiwakoti says.
The government has fixed the wage rates for workers in the agriculture, tea farming and manufacturing sectors, according to a notice published by the Nepal Ministry of Labour and Employment in December 2011.
Though the minimum wages are fixed for these sectors, other labor-intensive sectors do not have such provisions, says Indra Prasad Basyal, the undersecretary for the Ministry of Labour and Employment. As a result, employers can exploit the workers of these sectors by paying them less than what their work is worth.
He adds that the government is, however, seriously considering the issue, especially with regard to child laborers, who, instead of receiving an education for a bright future, are forced to earn their living through manual labor. Basyal says that the government will soon take effective steps to curb child labor and give these children an opportunity for education.
The government of Nepal plans to conduct an evaluation of the National Master Plan on Child Labour, which covers 2004 to 2014, Basyal says. The plan, which is committed to eliminating all forms of child labor by 2020, aims to eliminate the worst forms of child labor by 2016, such as crushing stone. The government has started taking necessary actions to enforce these commitments.
Manita receives a scholarship from the government to cover her school fees, but she says that her family needs more support.
“Neither the government nor any other agency has done anything for people like us who have to depend on daily wages for survival,” Manita says. “We have to work every day to be able to go to the school. If only the government would fix the wage rate, it would be very helpful for us to work.”
