HYDERABAD, Pakistan – Meni and her family belong to a low caste Hindu community that remained in Pakistan after partition. About 10 years ago, they migrated from the Thar Desert bordering India to Umerkot district in the southern province of Sindh. A clan member helped them to find work as tenant sharecroppers in the fields of an important landlord. This arrangement lasted for 8 years.
They took a number of small loans from the landlord for food, medicines and household commodities, as the meagre payments could not cover their basic needs. Each harvest, they were hoping to be able to repay the loans, but for several consecutive dry seasons, the harvest was poor and they were unable to pay back what they had borrowed. Also, the landlord applied an exorbitant interest on the loans and the amount kept increasing. Being illiterate, Meni was not able to question the way the landlord managed the loan. The family was soon deeply in debt.
The landlord put Meni's family under constant surveillance, thinking they would flee. He also refused them any payments, saying they could work just for their meals. Meni and her family were also subjected to numerous humiliations and threats. Apart from the last son, all family members were forced to work in the fields from sunrise to sunset.
In 1999, Meni's relatives helped the family to contact the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP). Her family was freed in late 1999 with the help of HRCP. They first migrated to Matli Camp more than 100 kilometres away to live with other families of former bonded labourers. They were working for daily wages of less than a dollar until the landlords raided the camp and kidnapped several families, forcing them back into bondage. Meni and her family managed to escape. Too scared to stay in Matli, they moved to Hoosri Camp near Hyderabad. Life there was very difficult, with no steady source of income. Ordinary expenditures accounted for every rupee they earned and they had to borrow for sickness or unexpected demand.
The ILO started working with the National Rural Support Programme (NRSP) in 2002, providing practical assistance to freed bonded labourer families living in six such camps near Hyderabad City in Sindh Province. Meni attended the meetings in which Social Organizers of the ILO/NRSP project introduced the concept of Self-Help Groups. Meni found this very appealing and discussed with her neighbours the idea of a Self Help Group so that they could provide their children with a better future.
On 17 September 2002, she and six other women formed a Self Help Group called Seeta Ram. The group members joined the savings programme and started saving small amounts regularly in their account. Before that, Meni had benefited from charities from time to time but the main programmes of poverty reduction considered her family and neighbours in the camp a population too difficult to work with to be included in their programmes.
The saving required was not much but, pulled together, it has helped them after some time to face minor emergencies. She did not have to rely on moneylenders every time her children fell sick. Also, she was given a box to save on a day-to-day basis, and not only the day before the group meeting. It had significant positive effects, as her husband also joined her in her saving efforts, and they were able to migrate for seasonal work and continue to save.
Meni and her husband tried hard to think of ways to increase their family's income. The most likely solution was to purchase a goat, which they would milk. She applied for a loan of Rs 3,000 in her self-help group meeting. The group members agreed to provide a collective guarantee and the application was processed. Meni received the loan and bought her goat. She has since almost reimbursed the loan and opened a small shop, with a small stock of sweets, lentils, flour, and other basic necessities. Her income from the shop is less than what she earns as a daily wage labourer, but the shop income has the advantage of being steady and provides income in the off-season when farm labour is not available.
Like 751 formerly bonded hari families (tenant sharecroppers) settled in seven camps in and around Hyderabad City, she benefits from various complementary services from the project. She has access to Medical Doctors (MDs) twice a week when they visit the camp and she can participate in health camps for a greater awareness on health and hygiene, preventive health measures, family planning and other health related issues. She has access to safe drinking water from hand pumps installed by the project with the participation of the communities.
Her children have joined one of the 12 primary level non-formal education centres with 430 pupils. The community members themselves run these schools with technical support from ILO/NRSP and a minimum honorarium for the teachers. She also attends training courses, adapted to her needs – for example, in accounts and book keeping, vocational skills, traditional birth attendant skills, and natural resources management.
This temporary integrated package of assistance aims to provide these extremely poor families released from bondage with an initial boost in terms of income, self-confidence and basic skills, so they will graduate to a level where they can be integrated into longer-term programmes for poverty reduction.
An additional problem faced by the majority of the project's target families is that they do not have national identity papers, and cannot therefore benefit from full legal protection. The community members consider this a top priority. So land was bought by NRSP to resettle the families permanently. The families are now buying these plots from NRSP on a subsidized lease basis and, once they have permanent addresses, will be able to apply for national ID cards and so acquire all the rights that go along with this.
The project is supporting the efforts of the Government of Pakistan to implement its National Plan of Action for the Abolition of Bonded Labour in a wide variety of ways. Rapid assessments of bonded labour have been undertaken in ten different sectors (from agriculture to mining to domestic service). A public poster campaign was implemented by the Department of Labour of the Sindh provincial government to raise the awareness of local elected bodies and relevant stakeholders on the issue of bonded labour. Lawyers have been supported, through the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, to handle bonded labour cases in the courts. Vigilance Committees, formally constituted under the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act of 1992, are being trained on their roles and on identification, release and rehabilitation methods.
There is now some real hope for Meni and her family to stay out of bondage, but much still remains to be done in rural Pakistan to make decent work a reality for all.
http://away.com/outside/features/200311/200311_mountains_1.html
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