By Soma Wadhwa

Sonia is 12 and blind; not surprisingly, she has never played with footballs, but from age six she was forced to stitch them, eight hours a day, seven days a week. Her dainty, deft fingers would often pierce her tiny hands with the needle as she pieced together tough bits of leather. But the child taught herself never to yelp in pain for fear of losing employment, which would have threatened her family's survival. Yet at the end of each day, she had not earned enough to buy even a loaf of bread.

Kailash, who is 44, has seen many such misery-ridden Sonias through to happy endings, yet he is no invincible hero. In fact, the crusade he has launched against child servitude in South Asia has seen him coping with as many disheartening defeats as victories. "How can I gloat over little triumphs when I see so many children being wasted as overworked and underpaid help at squalid factories, dingy shops and affluent urban homes every single day of my life? When I know that parents still give children away at brick kilns to work as bonded labourers as repayment of debt?"

Millions of Workers, Millions of Slaves

Sikander was 17 when he joined the Delhi shelter after six years of inhuman working conditions in a carpet factory in the Mirzapur district in Uttar Pradesh. Forced from age 10 to support a widowed, ailing mother and two younger siblings, Sikander toiled 12 hours a day to keep starvation at bay.

"I worked in tin sheds, which get terribly hot during summers. Also" - and he winced as he recalled those times - "we were often beaten if we made any mistakes." Then he was rescued by Kailash's network, and he is now training to become a welder.

Of the estimated 140 million working children in India, nearly half are, in effect, slaves. Poverty-stricken parents who need paltry sums of money - sometimes just for basic sustenance - borrow from money-lenders and literally sign away their livelihoods forever.

"There is just too much of this around for us to feel content about our work," Kailash said. "A problem of such a large scale, I have come to believe, has to be fought strategically: Raids, rescue and rehabilitation have to go hand in hand with engineering national and international aversion and support against child labour."

This is the philosophy that Kailash practices, that has spurred him and his organisation, the South Asian Coalition Against Child Servitude, to identify and liberate over 34,000 children working in industries across India, where grimy little hands working to fight hunger are an accepted reality. Even the upwardly mobile middle-class thinks little of employing young children to prepare their morning cuppa because such domestic help is plentiful and cheap. And parents in the poverty-ridden rural pockets are often forced to barter their children to repay debts that keep death away. Yes, in India, childhood is up for sale.

The Economics of Bonded Labour

Many companies fight to keep these little hands at work because to the manufacturers, it makes good economic sense. Factories making carpets, sporting goods, firecrackers, bangles and brassware prefer smaller hands to do the intricate work especially because children do not demand better working conditions or more pay.

There are also criminal elements who conspire to control the network of children in servitude and thwart the laws that ban employment of youngsters. As a result, no employer has ever been punished for violating a 1986 act that prohibits employing children in the carpet industry, a sector defined as hazardous. Frequently, employers of child labour shield their enterprises by posing as family concerns.

Kailash has attacked this evil despite the many powerful interests that resist any change that could damage profit margins.

He also recognised that the rescued children need rehabilitation, and in 1991, he established the Mukti Ashram (Shelter for the Liberated) in Delhi, which is run by volunteers. He has also established 14 informal education centres, which are funded by such international agencies such as Bread for the World, Christian Aid, Terre des Hommes and Miserior.

The first shelter found Kailash knocking on doors - literally - with requests for donations. "I guess because the initiation of the shelter saw ordinary people personally involving themselves in the cause by giving it their hard-earned money," he said, "the project has always been run at a personal level: Each child is special to us. Before we train them in a vocation, we make sure there is a need for such skills in their village. If the locality has no tailors or is short on a radio repairer, then that's the skill we prepare the child for. Along with education, of course."

Escape Through Education

At Mukti Ashram, the children get basic training in literacy, health and social issues. Those over 14 get vocational training in such trades as carpentry, tailoring and making cane and bamboo products. There are group discussions on the legal system and children's rights, as well as current political issues. The youngsters also help manage the ashram, thus acquiring leadership skills.

Once the children return to their villages, the ashram keeps track of how they fare. Many become economically independent, setting up small enterprises. Most importantly, these rehabilitated youngsters are helping to teach their communities to fight for their rights in order to prevent further bondage.

Some of the youngsters return to help Kailash in the raid-and-rescue operations. Thirteen-year-old Mohan, from Bihar state, was rescued from a carpet factory in Uttar Pradesh, where he had worked from age seven to ten. After a year in the Mukti Ashram in New Delhi, it became clear that he was a bright youngster, and Kailash enrolled him in one of the marches against child labour. After this Mohan returned to his village and gave talks in local schools about the cruel realities of child labour.

Fourteen-year-old Govind is doing the same. An underpaid telephone booth attendant during the day and a cook at night for a shop keeper in the Nepal-Sikkim border town Jhaba, the boy was rescued by Kailash's activists about three years ago. Once at the shelter, Govind impressed everyone by his quick mind and grasp of academic subjects, so he was encouraged to be part of all the Coalition's rallies and marches. He returned from a three-week visit to his village near Jhaba and informed Kailash about the local networks that he has set up there. He went to each family in his village and informed them of the poor conditions their children work in once they are sent away to the bigger cities.

"He is so fired up by what he has learnt here," Kailash said, "that he now plans to go to different villages in India and talk of his experiences as a child who had to work 16 hours a day. My children are all so bright. They are going to change society." He calls them "young multipliers of the message.''

Addressing the Regional Problem

Through the Coalition, which was founded in 1989, Kailash has supplemented these individual rescue operations with a vigorous campaign to garner public opinion against child labour. Today The South Asian Coalition Against Child Servitude comprises 400 partner organisations, including human rights groups and trade unions in Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Sri Lanka.

"The need for comrades in the combat was obvious," he said. "I realised that children in the region were all facing the same pernicious fate, and that the fight had to be for all of them. Banning child labour in India would only shift businesses that thrive on such inexpensive labour to the neighbouring countries. These children are ours, you cannot shun their problems because they don't share your nationality."

Every wall in Kailash's small, functional office in South Delhi seems to reflect this belief. Huge black and white photographs of children from South Asian countries who are working away their childhood crowd the office, reminders that millions will have to join hands to save the millions suffering. He points at them and says, "Children are world citizens and the world must come together to save them."

It was this global outlook that brought Kailash to push through a carpet-consumers awareness campaign that culminated in the creation of Rugmark, a label that certifies carpets made without child labour. To be Rugmark-certified, carpet manufacturers agree to independent monitoring and inspections. A presentation by Kailash in 1991 before a United Nations human rights subcommission in Geneva resulted in U.N. endorsement of the label.

The Power of a Positive Label

He is unwilling to hazard a guess on the percentage of carpet manufacturers who comply with the Rugmark requirements, but he points out that Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Britain and the United States import only Rugmark carpets from the Subcontinent. The certification is not foolproof, of course. James Tufenkian, an American who is on the board of Rugmark and whose company employs about 6,000 weavers in Nepal, was quoted in The New York Times last October as saying, "While Rugmark's heart is 100 percent in the right place, how can we know what's really going on in the weavers' homes?"

Added to these advocacy efforts, Kailash has organised many marches in India and Nepal as part of an ongoing protest against child labour. His latest effort saw him co-ordinating a Global March Against Child Labour this year. Commencing in January 1998, the march saw activists, supporters and many a child labourer march in Asia, Africa, America, Australia and Europe and many of them traveled to Geneva in June for the drafting of a new convention on child labour by the International Labour Organisation.

Not that Kailash is hungering for appreciation; he is quite prepared to meet any criticism that might come his way and advances some himself: "People might say we have no business touring the world when the problem of child labour is nowhere near eradication back home. But that's a very narrow approach. In today's globalised world you can't sort out anything by remaining home."

An Early Start

True perhaps. Kailash's first brush with child labour was close to home in a small town in Madhya Pradesh. Perplexed to see the cobbler's son not attending school like him, seven-year-old Kailash innocently asked why, only to be told that children born to the Untouchable castes in India have no option but to work. The sentence stuck with him. So did the desire to change the terrible truth of the statement. Years later, while studying electrical engineering at the Regional Engineering School in Vidisha, Madhya Pradesh state, where he was born, he organised a book bank to help those students who could not afford new textbooks.

After teaching engineering for a few years Kailash decided to work more directly for social change. "The world had to know the shocking truth. The world had to be shocked. And I chose not to remain with a mainstream profession but to change things. I walked out of home." Now, others walk with him, in his marches against the sale of childhood.