why do you think the movement save childhood cherished by kailash satyarthi gained global attention
Answers
Children may have been given the right to education, but now they must be educated about their rights. This is the new challenge faced by Kailash Satyarthi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize 2014. He has been at the forefront of the fight against child slavery and labour since 1980, when he founded his movement, the Bachpan Bachao Andolan(link is external) (Save the Childhood Movement), which has helped liberate more than 85,000 children in India from exploitation – through education and rehabilitation.
Satyarthi tells the UNESCO Courier how his quest to improve the lives of children began, what he hopes for from his new cause to make schools safe, and why he believes true liberation starts with education.
Interview by Mary de Sousa
Where and how did your impulse to fight for children's rights start?
When I was five. The very first day of my schooling, I saw a boy, around the same age as me, sitting outside the school and looking at my shoes. He had a shoe-polishing box in front of him. I was very disturbed. My first-ever question to the teacher was: why was the boy outside and not inside the school? The teacher said it was very common for poor children to have to work.
One day I asked the boy’s father about this and he said his father and grandfather had also been shoe-shiners. Then he said: “Sir, don’t you know that people like you are born to go to school and people like us are born to work?” That question really stayed with me, but I had no answer as a child.
When I got older, I saved my old schoolbooks and collected my pocket money to pay the fees for poor children. I trained as an electrical engineer, but the feeling that I should do something for these children never left me. I left my job to become truly involved.
What would you say were your first major achievements?
From the very start – when I used to write and print thousands of leaflets to be distributed in the market for our first campaign – I have believed that education and liberation are two sides of the same coin. When I first tried to bring the issue of child labour into the public domain, there was nothing being done about it. India did not have a law against child labour till 1986. I fought for six years for this law and it is still not perfect, so the fight goes on.
When I freed children from slavery and asked for them to attend school, I was humiliated so many times. I was told they are dirty, uncared for, we can’t have them here.
I spoke to legal friends, who explained to me the problem was that India did not have education classed as a human right in its Constitution. It was only in 2001 that a mass campaign led to the 86th Amendment to our Constitution, making education a human right.
Your child labour campaign started in India, but soon became international. How did that happen?
It took two decades before it became a global issue. When I founded the Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA(link is external)) in 1980 in India, I discovered that none of the United Nations bodies – the International Labour Organization (ILO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) – or the World Bank, had any international legal instrument to prevent children from being drawn into labour, trafficking, prostitution and other dangerous occupations.
I began to look at Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh, and realized that they all had similar situations concerning contemporary slavery. In parallel, I started to participate in the Human Rights Commission in Geneva, Switzerland, and decided to work towards an international law against child slavery.
I campaigned in Europe and America and set up a programme in Germany to fight against child labour. As a result, the first ILO International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour(link is external) was born in 1992, and then UNICEF and the World Bank joined in.
In 1993, BBA initiated the first campaign in the form of a march against child labour in India. Five years later, we launched the 80,000-kilometre Global March Against Child Labour across 103 countries, which lasted for six months.
The crowning achievement of these efforts was undoubtedly the ILO Convention 182(link is external), concerning the Prohibition and Immediate Action for the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labour. It was unanimously adopted and ratified by 181 countries. This happened in 1999, twenty years after my first leaflets were circulated in India.