Harnessing the Energy: Learning from Young People on the Margins

By Sushmita Ghosh

In situations of conflict, the beginnings of a compromise sometimes lie outside the conflict itself. Decades of political tension and suspicion among the countries of the Subcontinent, for example, tensions aggravated by the recent nuclear tests by India and Pakistan, are being set aside by campaigners against one of the area's worst scourges: child labor.

This reality presents itself in the office of the South Asian Coalition Against Child Servitude, an Indian nonprofit organization that has sparked international consumer awareness and legislation to combat child labor: Huge black and white photographs of child laborers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and other South Asian countries cover the office walls – children very much from the same hell, undivided by territorial hubris.

Kailash Satyarthi, the man who launched the coalition, provides common ground for a region struggling to find one: All children on the Subcontinent face the same risk; banning child labour in India would only shift businesses that thrive on inexpensive labor to neighboring countries. All these children are ours. We cannot shun them because we do not share their nationality.

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