Interns' Diary: Afsoon Donna Houshidari IIJournal # 2Tuesday July 4, 2006 Our team set out from Lucknow at 6 am and drove 6 hours to Bhadohi, another city in the state of Uttar Pradesh where the office of the Project Management Unit (PMU) of the Bal Adhikar Child Labour Elimination Project is based. Upon our arrival, we were met by the three Project Management Officers, Gopaul, Sanjeev and Persaud, as well as the Project Management Head, Jeswal. Jeswal is a government official, on leave from the Department of Women and Child Development, to run the project. We spent over four hours asking them questions on how the project functions—questions that were outstanding from the annual reports and assessments we had read back in Lucknow. In a small room packed with about 20 people, we asked them how the project has changed over the years since its inception, why certain strategies were adopted over others, and to tell us of their personal experience running the project. After sorting out the details of our 10 day visit with them, we got back into the jeep for the one hour ride to Varanasi, the "Holy City," where we settled in and prepared ourselves for the first visit to the villages the next day. Bhadohi is the name of the city that is the capital of the district of the same name. A district is equivalent to a Canadian region or an American county. Bhadohi is one of the six districts that comprise India’s carpet belt. We will visit it and two others, Mirzapur and Jaunpur. Driving through the rural areas of these districts is a feast for the eyes. There are mango trees, guava trees, rice paddies, and corn and sugarcane fields. There are cows and dogs and even the occasional elephant (for which I asked our driver to stop so that I could take a good look and snap a photo. It is the first time I’ve seen elephants outside a zoo, and my delight was clearly palpable (they are one of my favourite animals) so the next day, when we saw peacocks crossing the road, the driver stopped without my asking and told me to get out and take a picture!) Among the people on the roads, the women stand out the most, in their brightly coloured saris that seem to be dancing around them when the hot wind blows their way. Occasionally there is a town, where the mud houses are replaced by brick and cement ones closer and closer to one another. They are adjacent to little shops selling everything from medication to chickens to cloth to tea. Mango sellers line the streets, and as there is no drainage/sanitation system, (an issue another team of interns is analysing) garbage also lines the streets. For a first-time visitor to India, all this fills me with wonder and curiosity and gives me a better understanding of the context in which I will be looking at child rights. As we neared Bhadohi district, signs of the carpet industry became apparent. There are the people riding bicycles piled with wool and I caught the occasional glimpse of a carpet loom in a garage-like structure with the door half-way open. We passed by mounds of yarn—just dyed, and lying out in the sun drying. More and more frequently, we saw cyclists with little carpets the size of coffee tables piled on them, and even the occasional rider with one huge carpet threatening to tip the precarious balance of its bicycle at every moment. Through all of these users of the roads, our driver navigated with a courage that I cannot claim to espouse! The locals laugh at my squeals of fright as we narrowly evade an oncoming truck, a cow, or a rickshaw. (We plead with our driver, saying "aram, aram" (softly), but somehow I get a feeling that word isn’t part of his vocabulary. But he’s been in this business for so long that we all he has gained our confidence). Soon we will meet carpet weavers and ask them directly about their life situations and why it is that they send their children to work. The Bal Adhikar Project aims at prevention and elimination of child labour rather than rehabilitation of child labourers. UNICEF’s definition of a child labourer, which guides that of the Project, is any child that is not in school. It is telling that such a broad definition has been adopted. After an initial baseline assessment of social indicators has been conducted in a village, the project launches three main lines of action: 1. community mobilization and knowledge-building on child rights; 2. empowerment of women through Self-Help Groups (SHGs); and 3. enrollment of children in school. They have created Alternative Learning Centres (ALCs) for children who have never been in school or who have dropped out of school. The aim is that after completing grades 1-4 in the ALC, these children will be mainstreamed into government schools. Our ten day field visit will consist broadly of visiting villages where community mobilization has occurred, and where there are ALCs and SHGs established. We have prepared a series of questionnaires, both qualitative and quantitative, that we will undertake, and we have interactions planned with all levels of stakeholders, ranging from children, to adolescents, mothers, fathers, NGOs, local motivators selected by the NGOs, various levels of administrators, carpet suppliers, government officials in the departments of labour and education, as well as the UNICEF officer back in Lucknow, and the IKEA representative in New Delhi. All of this is new and exciting, and makes me feel like a detective who is slowly putting together pieces of a puzzle. Our final aim is to discover what effects this project is having on the local community, what its best practices are, lessons learned, and what potential areas of improvement we can identify. Being in law school, I can’t help but interject a disclaimer at this juncture: there are clearly researchers more qualified in the carpet industry and child labour than myself and my team members who could undertake this sort of project. The value we add as interns is therefore to look at the project with a set of objective, independent and "fresh eyes" and to contribute to the growth of a base of knowledge regarding the situation of children in India. In the meantime, India is spoiling me with its richness of colour and beauty reflected in both the land and its people. I look forward to the days ahead.
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