Dhangadhi, Jan. 10 : Fifty-year-old Tikaram Chaudhari of Beladevipur village development committee (vdc)-1, Kailali district, has decided that enough is enough and broke free from the age-old practice of bonded labour.

Chaudhari had been working as a Kamaiya (bonded agriculture labourer) at the house of Punna Rana in the same locality. He decided to give up the practice once he was able to repay the ancestral debt of Rs 4,000 that he owed to Rana.

Tikaram Chaudhari took loans from the mobile fund for Kamaiya upliftment conducted by the district land reforms office and repaid the loan to his master.

However, whether Chaudhari would work as a Kamaiya or would be a free man would be decided by his master on the day of the Maghi festival according to age-old practice among the Tharu community.

Not only Tikaram Chaudhari, three others who are among the ten remaining Kamaiyas in their village, have also decided to break free of the Kamaiya system of bonded labour.

Chaudhari believes that various awareness programmes launched by the land reforms office and a non-governmental organisation called the Backward Society Education (base) have helped improve the socio-economic condition of the Kamaiyas.

Twenty-year-old Bujhauna Chaudhari, who disassociated himself from the age-old practice two years back says that he was not facing any economic difficulty to make ends meet.

Similarly, 22-year-old Juhari Chaudhari of Ratanpur vdc-5, Kailali district has decided to quit working as a Kamaiya. Juhari Chaudhari, who does not own a piece of land, has started working as an independent wage labourer. He plans to construct a hutment on a piece of public land near the Mohana river.

Describing his life as a Kamaiya, Juhari says that he had to work the field of his master from dawn to dusk and even that was not sufficient to sustain his family of six.

Maghi is a time when new Kamaiyas are recruited. Prospective landlords begin to search for a new batch of Kamaiyas on a very cheap wage basis.

This practice is prevalent in Kailali, Kanchanpur, Banke, Bardiya and Dang districts of West Nepal.

With the objective of uplifting the status of Kamaiyas and banishing the practice from the society, His Majesty’s Government has implemented the Kamaiya debt relief and skill development programme.

Under the programme, the district land reforms office has been conducting various skill-development, employment generation and economic assistance programmes aimed at the Kamaiyas in those districts.

According to a statistics made available by the district land reforms office, there are 5,557 Kamaiyas in Kailali and none of them owns land.