Dear Editor,
Last Friday the Guyana Chronicle carried a report of a most heinous example of enforced child labour in India which still ‘haunts’ me as I am sure it must have troubled any caring human reading it. As reported, some 350 small children were virtually kidnapped from their hometown in the poor state of Bihar to be ‘enslaved’ by a greedy employer in another state and made to toil endlessly in a leather factory in which they were forced to live in sub-human conditions. When the children were discovered, they were severely malnourished and emaciated with sores covering their weary bodies.
Man’s inhumanity to other men is bad enough, but when such beastly behaviour by the greedy, get-rich-quick multi-millionaires extend to hapless, hungry children, then one wonders if the perpetrators are not guilty of crimes against humanity and therefore, should be put away from society for good.
As a layman and also from my many years of working within the United Nations system, I know that there are international conventions which prohibit such dastardly actions; of course, enforcement is an ongoing challenge. While appeals to basic human values and feelings should be enough to discourage such breaches there will always be the incorrigible. These must be dealt with condignly!
On reflection, as a Guyanese who has experienced poverty at first hand (having come from a large family of poor logie-living sugar workers, who actually picked up tennis-balls for the white plantation owners/managers, helped my mother complete her extra-tasks as an ambitious weeder and worked myself as a part-time labourer to defray my high school expenses etc etc), I can personally relate to the need for the poor to labour, but in and with dignity! If my personal experiences is anything to go by then I can truly say that even in the worst days of colonialism and the plantocracy, we never had it as bad as it seems to be in relatively well-off parts of India. So it all boils down to sheer greed in India and by the same token in places like Bangladesh where ‘sweat-shops’ in the garment industry is another example of such greed.
Notwithstanding, as Guyanese, we cannot be self-righteous about the way we treat the underprivileged, the vulnerable and the children in our own country. For example, recent media reports have left us all aghast at the perpetuation of advantage being taken by the rich and politically powerful among us who seem to think that their wealth and power can insulate them from the law as they pursue sex with teenage children for pittances and buy their way out of self-inflicted breaches of the laws of our country.
Furthermore, incidents like the recent ‘burial- alive’ of the teenager working (Illegally/improperly under-age???) as a porter, in a rice factory in Essequibo, also comes to mind. While the employer must be commended for assuming responsibility for the accident to the extent that compensation was offered to the parents, it behooves our colleagues in the relevant government departments to ensure that the necessary safety/health/human resource measures are strictly applied in the workplaces of our beloved country.
Yours faithfully,
Nowrang Persaud
