Intern's diary: Afsoon Donna Houshidari
30 June, 2006
As a law student at the University of Toronto, I am eager to learn about the practical application of international legislation—to which both Canada and India subscribe—regarding the rights of children. I’m especially excited to be investigating UNICEF’s “Carpet Belt Initiative,” a project that aims to eliminate and prevent child labour by addressing its root causes, including issues related to women’s empowerment and the debt-poverty spiral. The project is situated in Uttar Pradesh, India’s mightiest state in terms of population, which is located in northern India bordering Nepal. If this state were a country on its own, it would be the sixth largest in the world! After a week of orientation and armed a mountain of information and enthusiasm, twelve interns set out on the seven hour train ride from New Delhi to Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh’s capital on June 16, 2006. In addition to the Carpet Belt Initiative case study, there are three other projects based here at the University of Lucknow: the Adolescent Anemia Project, the Sanitation in Schools Project, and the Accelerated Learning Project. Between the twelve of us, the interns represent a variety of academic backgrounds and seven different countries from around the world. Akshay Mangla, a PhD student of political economy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, and Diksha Gupta, a law student focusing on human rights at the University of Pune, India, are my team members. Our supervisor at the University of Lucknow, Dr. Arvind Mohan, is a professor of economics and a consultant with several international organizations including the World Bank and UNDP. We’ve come to appreciate him as much more than an academic supervisor, given his constant and heartening reassurance that any challenge we may face is incontestably surmountable (not to mention his endless recommendations of varieties of Indian foods to try out). Currently, Diksha, Akshay and I are immersing ourselves in the literature surrounding child rights and child labour, the carpet industry and the reports of the Bal Adhikar (meaning child rights in Hindi) Carpet Belt Initiative. The project was created in partnership with IKEA, the Swedish international home furnishings retailer, in 2000. Many of IKEA’s carpets are sourced from Uttar Pradesh’s carpet weaving belt. This “belt” refers to six districts of the state, and as an agReducing and eventually eliminating this statistic is clearly no easy task; the issue of child labour is a multifaceted and highly complicated one.gregate, it produces 85 percent of India’s carpet exports. UNICEF states that up to 22 percent of the industry’s workforce are children, according to studies in the 1990s. Our ultimate goal is to produce a report documenting the challenges, best practices, and lessons learned through the initiative. We will spend two weeks conducting research in the villages in which the project is under way. We leave on Monday, so my next update will be from the field!
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