Editorial»
Labour pain
APR 26 -
The government decision in 2008 to free them from their bonded status should have come as great relief for around 20,000 Haliyas (bonded tillers) in the Mid- and Far-West Nepal. Instead, the decision reignited suspicions among Haliyas that the government was merely trying to wash its hands of the tricky task of their resettlement. At the root of these suspicions was the government’s botched attempt in 2000, whereby it declared the Kamaiyas (another class of bonded labourers) free but miserably failed in its responsibility of rehabilitating the freed men, women and children. A decade on, 6,000 of the 30,000 ex-Kamaiyas are yet to be rehabilitated.
Likewise, the Haliya system was officially abolished on Sept. 6, 2008 without putting in place any plan to provide for the livelihoods of the freed tillers. On paper, there are provisions aplenty to look after their pressing needs. Even the Interim Constitution provisions for their timely rehabilitation. But successive governments have been unable to do anything meaningful towards implementing the provisions on paper.
The trouble is: While the government declared them free, most labourers have neither formal education nor technical skills to be eligible to join productive workforce. More importantly, they have no place to call home and no land to practice their traditional farming skills. The highly skewed landholding patterns in Nepal makes it unlikely that enough land can be arranged for to house all freed labourers. And the ex-Kamaiyas and Haliyas are all too aware of their grim situation. Many freed Kamiyas are already returning to their former masters and Haliyas to their backbreaking work.
The reasons are not hard to fathom. The Haliyas were declared free, but political pressure from the landed gentry meant that were freed of any obligation to help in the rehabilitation of their former employees. There have been other logistical issues that have been hampering government efforts towards that end: there seems to be no reliable data on the freed Kamaiyas and Haliyas. The surveys carried out during the civil war, it is widely believed, are highly inaccurate and left many Kamaiyas unaccounted for with the result that those who didn’t register missed out on even the meager rehabilitation packages on offer.
The government clearly didn’t learn from the mistakes it made in 2000 while deciding to free Haliyas in 2008. The lack of seriousness on its part is reflected in the fact that the estimates of Haliya numbers were taken only after they were declared free. But even if all the concerned stakeholders worked in earnestness, resettlement would still be a hard nut to crack. Since the issue of bonded labour is associated with land holding patterns, the only long term solution to the problem can be scientific land reform. In this line, both the Interim Constitution as well as the Comprehensive Peace Accord spell out the need for readjustment of old feudalistic landholding patterns. Meantime, the freed Haliyas can only look on in despair as many of the Kamaiyas freed eight years prior to their own release are struggling just to stay alive.
Posted on: 2010-04-27 07:21
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