Damodar Acharya (above, wearing orange shirt) attends a Bhima Sangha meeting at Nhama Bhoomi. Classes here equip students with tools for empowerment, giving them access to knowledge, vocational training, life skills and an understanding of the political and socio-political environments that drive policies which they want to change by organizing.
As the son of a village Hindu priest, Acharya (who is known as "Damu") felt the pressure of studying in a village school. He could not afford higher education in Kundapur and had migrated to Bangalore to settle into a clerical job in a publishing house.
"Everything I did brought disappointment," he recalls. "My employees harassed me in every way. Life was hard. I woke at three in the morning every day to walk several kilometers to work. These were typical frustrations of migrant youth." One of his earliest insights was somewhat startling: that economics alone does not interfere with children's education.
"In our country, economic poverty locks in firmly with social poverty, political poverty and environmental poverty and drives children out of schools," he explains. "The education system is driven by class and caste biases, and does not equip children to respond to other forms of poverty that play out in their lives. Schools defeat their own purpose. Reading and writing do not help when entire forest-based livelihoods get wiped away, or when teachers harass students for their lower-caste allegiances.
"Given such a situation, a child's decision to work for the family rather than go to school is the most appropriate choice he can make," Damu continues. "This is why 10-year-old girls would prefer to walk 35 kilometers to fetch fuel rather than walk to school: The first option made them independent and gave them bargaining power in families; the second cloistered them between classroom walls. Similarly, work in hotels empowered a working child with trade skills; classroom education taught them about the distant Himalayas."
Damu's dull job as a keyboard operator opened the door for his life's work: the company's refusal to "release" his degree certificate led Damu to protest and expose several other unfair labor practices. This experience landed him firmly in the trade union movement.
Working with labor unions, Damu focused on hotel workers in Bangalore city. This work led to lobbying and legal advocacy with Concern for Working Children (CWC), an organization which was trying to eradicate child labor by stopping the flow of children from rural areas. Damu began a rural program within CWC and eventually became the Executive Director, a position from which he implements his ideas to eradicate child labor.
Damodar Acharya
