By Joe Bavier

Ten-year-old Kale Tamang’s life is dictated to him by the cycle of the sun. As soon as there is light, he sets out from the mud brick hut that is his home, winding his way through a maze of footpaths that traverse the terraced rice paddies which form the border between his village and the stone quarry where he will spend the next twelve hours. And when that light is gone, and he can no longer see the pile of stones it is his job to reduce to gravel, he gets up and walks back home.

Kale is one of an estimated 32,000 children working in a stone quarrying industry that has sprung up over the last decade to feed a rapidly urbanizing Nepal’s insatiable appetite for new construction. He’s shy and talks little. But the overdeveloped physique wrapped around his tiny frame speaks volumes. At an age when most children spend their days in school and their afternoons playing cricket in the street, Kale divides his time between hauling baskets filled with boulders out from the quarry floor and crushing them with a small hammer. He’s never set foot inside a classroom.

It is some of the most monotonous and unrewarding work available, and, with an injury rate for children topping 90 percent, it is also among the country’s most hazardous. Stone fragments break off with every blow of the hammer. Eye injuries are common. Workers regularly smash their own fingers. Many children suffer from persistent joint pains due to the heavy loads they carry all day. And in a workplace where huge boulders are harvested from high cliff walls and are then sent crashing to the quarry floor, the possibility of serious injury is a very real one.

Earlier this year, at the stone quarry where Kale works, a mistimed dynamite blast crippled several workers and sent one man to his death. It took a recovery crew two days to dig the body out from where it lay buried under a mountain of rubble. But to this day, there is no first-aid kit.

But despite the deplorable conditions and the sheer size of an industry that employs some 100,000 workers nationwide, until fairly recently, the stone quarries and the children that make up a third of their workforce received scant attention.

Bijaya Sainju heads Concern for Children and Environment-Nepal an organization now actively working with the kids of the stone quarries. When his organization began looking into the sector in the late nineties, he was shocked to discover that, despite efforts by children’s rights groups to combat child labor abuses in other areas, the quarry children were almost entirely ignored.

“Child labor itself, nowadays, is a more burning issue,” Sainju says. “The International Labor Office and the government have identified five different areas of worst child labor. They later added two more. But when we came to know of stone quarry child labor, I was surprised that nothing was being done for them.”

One of the primary obstacles Concern Nepal faced when it began working for the rights of stone quarry children was an overall lack of information on the industry. Though some quarries have been operating for decades, many if not most have appeared during the urban construction boom of the last ten years. New ones open every day.

Of the 1,600 believed to be in operation today, less than a third are officially registered with the government. The rest produce no records, no employment figures, and because a worker’s pay is based on the amount of stone quarried and not a daily or hourly wage, many employers have no idea how many people are working for them much less how many are children.

In 1999, Concern Nepal set out to fill in the gaps in their knowledge. The resulting report shone a harsh light on what was quickly revealed as one of the country’s most exploitative working environments.

Family Business

Scattered across the quarry where Kale works, small groups huddle together like scores of little human archipelagos awash in an ocean of rock. They cram in under umbrellas tied to sticks, or green branches stuck into the ground, anything that might provide a little relief from the afternoon sun in this barren landscape. Each island is a family.

Kale’s mother, Gori Maya, sits on the ground, placing rock after rock on a flat stone, breaking them into smaller pieces. Next to her, Kale and his younger brother do the same, while their six-year-old sister sits atop a pile of gravel that has been growing slowly all day.

A truck roars up the dirt road a few meters away, kicking up a cloud of dust and belching out exhaust fumes.

“The boys’ father died when they were younger,” she says, shifting the weight of the one-year-old sleeping on her back. “We had a house in Nuwakot district, some land, and a few cows. But then there was the flood, the house was washed away. There was no work, and we had no place to live. So, we came here.”

Nearly 40 percent of all stone quarry workers are migrants. Many come to the city looking for better jobs, a practice that began with the introduction of democracy in 1990. But with the onset of the Maoist insurgency in 1996, rural Nepal suddenly became the front lines of the war between rebels and the government’s security forces.

Whole families now make the move to urban areas, fleeing a devastated rural economy and the real possibility of getting caught in the crossfire of a war that has now entered its eighth year.

And though some cite the fact that kids are able to work along with their families as proof that the stone quarry industry is among the country’s more child-friendly sectors, such family bonds are one of the major obstacles to child rights groups seeking to end underage labor.

“Many parents from the villages are illiterate, and they don’t see any immediate returns from sending them to school. So, they want their children to work instead of going to school,” Sainju says. “But these stone quarry children are always deprived of their basic rights to education, health, and recreation.”

Concern Nepal found that nearly 85 percent of the stone quarry children came to work there through a parent or family member. Of those parents, more than 95 percent were illiterate.

Scraping By

But the chief hurdle to any progress in the stone quarries is a depressingly familiar one.

For most, the decision to put children to work as stone crushers boils down to a simple question of economics, as the higher cost of living in urban areas has many families using every available resource simply to get by.

On her own, Gori Maya can earn from Rs. 1,500 to 1,700 monthly. Rent for the family’s three by three meter hut runs Rs. 600. And with another Rs. 1,200 going for food, without the help of her children’s meager income, the family would come up short every month.

“I need the boys to work,” she says.

Such precarious economic situations are commonplace in the quarries and have yielded some shocking statistics. The average age of child laborers in the stone quarries is twelve years, a full year younger than the national average for other sectors. More than two-thirds of those children worked from nine to ten hours each day. Still others regularly pulled twelve-hour shifts. And it is not uncommon to see children as young as five working alongside adults.

Kale smiles when asked whether his 6-year-old sister ever helps out with the stone breaking.

“She does a little, but she really can’t do much,” he says, cupping his hands together to indicate the tiny size of her contribution. “She doesn’t get her own pile. The stones she breaks just go onto mine.”

Working together, Kale and his brother can crush enough gravel to fill three large baskets. At the end of most days, they take home less than 40 rupees between them.

Only six percent earn up to the Rs. 60 – minimum daily wage the government has recommended for similar sectors. More than a third pocket less than 20 rupees per day.

“This Government Has Failed”

Of course, none of this is technically legal.

In 1992, the Nepali government passed the Children’s Act with the highly publicized goal of protecting the rights of all children and placing a ban on the use of children under the age of fourteen in the workplace.

The law was later followed up with the Children’s Regulation of 1994, and most recently with the Child Labor Prohibition and Regulation Act passed in 2000.

Successive governments have ratified myriad international agreements aimed at protecting children, the most noteworthy being the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child, which guarantees, among other things, rights to education, health, and recreation.

On paper, Nepal should be on equal footing with the countries of Western Europe and North America. But though donor countries place much pressure upon the governments of the developing world to sign onto international conventions, such measures have proved largely unenforceable. And in reality, Nepal currently has one of the world’s worst reputations for child exploitation.

Gauri Pradhan is president of Child Workers in Nepal, a pressure group that pushed hard for laws to protect children and which is now having to work even harder to get them enforced.

“The government is good and progressive at creating laws and ratifying international conventions,” he says. “They are just very bad at implementing them. And children suffer a great deal because of this.”

“We’ve been pressing the government to implement these laws for 5 years. If this government cannot implement its own legislation, it means that this government has failed.”

In 1999, Tribhuvan University published a study on the state of child labor in Nepal. It found that more than two and a half million children were employed on a regular basis in more than seventy sectors. 60 percent of those were under the age of fourteen, and therefore legally prohibited from working. Taking into account Nepal’s high birth rate and the lack of any real action on the part of the government to combat this trend, those figures are almost certainly higher today.

The Nepali government has long claimed a lack of resources as the principle reason for not doing more to tackle the growing child labor problem, and considering the kingdom’s position near the top of the list of the world’s poorest countries it’s clear the Singh Durbar can only do so much. But that doesn’t grant them a free pass to do nothing at all, says Pradhan.

He cites a recent decision banning members of the government from employing child workers in their homes.

“You shouldn’t have to force government ministers to follow laws that they themselves have written and passed,” he says.

Bijaya Sainju agrees.

“Legally, they can put them in jail, because they are violating the Children’s Act, but this is not happening. There are two reasons. First, we have very weak laws. Which means, the government doesn’t care and the government doesn’t take the situation seriously, and so there isn’t any enforcement at all. The other reason it is happening in Nepal is that it is silently accepted in Nepal.”

A Demographic Nightmare

According to the 2001 census, 52 percent of all Nepalis are now under the age of eighteen. 45 percent are sixteen or younger. And with an annual growth rate of 2.3 percent, the population is getting younger every year. Far from getting smaller, the number of working children is growing daily.

Underage workers now make up a full quarter of the workforce, contributing at least 10 percent of Nepal’s total GDP.

All of this has led many Nepalis to view international pressure to completely do away with child labor as both impractical and potentially harmful to the country’s overall economic development.

And though donor countries largely disagree, the more than $18 million that international aid agencies sink into programs targeting child labor each year have barely made a dent in the situation.

In 2002, the ILO’s International Program on the Elimination of Child Labor launched a new project targeting the absolute worst forms of child labor. Nepal was chosen along with El Salvador and Tanzania to participate in the initial pilot project.

Instead of pushing for the complete elimination of child labor, the Time-Bound Program, as it was dubbed, would focus on seven sectors of the Nepali economy where some 160,000 children are working in some of the country’s most dangerous jobs.

But three years into the ten-year program, IPEC is already well behind their projected mid-term goals. And though quarry workers fall within the scope of the IPEC initiative, almost no work has been done in the sector.

A Simple Step

But any real change, most feel, should and must come from Nepal itself. And though a final solution may still be a long way off, child rights activists say one step is essential if progress is ever to be made.

Officially, any company employing more than ten workers should be legally registered with the government and should come under the provisions of the Labor Act of 1991. But in actual practice, some of the country’s biggest industries remain informal and their workers, therefore, are not protected under the protective umbrella of workers’ rights legislation. It is a situation that is particularly harmful to child workers, 90 percent of whom work in informal sectors.

A strict application of the law would guarantee basic rights to the overwhelming majority of stone quarry workers. It wouldn’t exactly be the kind of child protection most groups are pushing for, but it would certainly be a step in the right direction. And it’s a very real option that sets the stone quarries apart from other leading child labor sectors.

But the primary resistance to such a move comes, unsurprisingly, from those that have the most to lose.

“Employers don’t want to keep permanent workers,” says Umesh Upadhyaya, Deputy Secretary General of the General Federation of Nepalese Trade Unions, which has recently begun organizing workers in the quarries. “They are always trying to curtail labor costs, because that’s really the only cost they have control over. So, there are no salaries. They are basically considered self-employed workers. And they are in a very exploitative situation.”

The whole industry, he says, is currently exploiting a loophole that could easily be closed if the government were willing to make the effort.

And, in theory at least, they should have one enormous incentive to do so. As the situation currently stands, of the hundreds of millions of rupees Nepal’s stone quarries take in each year, the government doesn’t see a paisa.

“They could simply fix the tax process so that some money goes to the local bodies to pay for the process,” says Upadhyaya. “And some of the revenues could go to the government.”

“It will definitely increase the government’s tax revenue. And it will also contribute to the alleviation of the poverty problem.”

But so far, the government has shown surprisingly little interest in such a move.

No Way Forward, No Way Back

The years he’s spent working for children’s rights in Nepal have turned Bijaya Sainju into a pragmatist. He’s used to fighting uphill battles, and so his expectations are tinged with realism.

“Children working in stone quarries are working in very hazardous conditions, but still many families are dependent on their children’s income. So, when we know this is our worst sector, we have to eradicate it,” he says, quickly adding, “But we are not in a position to call for its eradication overnight. What we are saying is, let them have education, let them have some kind of health and recreational facilities, and at the same time stay with their parents. Let us not say don’t work. Let them work, but not 12 hours, 14 hours a day. And give them some skills so they can get out of the quarries.”

For the Tamang family, unless change comes quickly, it will probably be too late for Kale. They simply have no other options. But there is the hope that the younger children may somehow see a better life.

Next week, as families across the country make the pilgrimage home for the festival season, the Tamangs won’t be among them. They don’t have money for the trip, and there’s no place for them to go.

“We will stay here,” says Gori Maya. “There’s nothing there for us to go back to.”