Elephants
don’t forget
There
was a bad Tailor in a village long ago. He used to play pranks with people. In
that village there was a very good elephant. You know Maithree, elephants are
very big animals. Though they are huge, they are very caring. If you give them
Bananas they will take it from your hands. They also place their trunk on your
head and bless you. The elephants love to take bath in cold water. They would
go inside the tank , swim and also enjoy pouring water all over themselves.
The
Mahout( he is the care taker of elephants) used to take the elephant daily to
its bath. On the way was the tailors shop. One day the tailor offered a banana
fruit to the elephant. From that day, the elephant used to bless the tailor
daily. Then the tailor thought of playing tricks with the elephant. The next
day when the elephant blessed him, he took the needle he was stitching and
drove it in side the trunk of the elephant. The elephant was very angry . But
it kept quiet. From that day, the elephant stopped blessing the tailor. After a
few more days, the tailor forgot the entire thing. It was Deepavali. You know
Maithree, on Deepavali days, all people get new clothes stitched. So the
Tailors shop was full of clothes. The elephant that day while returning from
its bath in the tank, stored lot of muddy water in its trunk. When it came near
the Tailors shop it introduced its trunk inside the shop and poured all the
muddy water inside the shop. All the new clothes were spoiled. The villagers
got very angry with the tailor for spoiling all their clothes and beat him Thus
the elephant punished the tailor.
Child labour: An Indian boy
tells his story to the ILO in Geneva
A 14-year-old boy, Mohammad Manan Ansari, talks about how he escaped exploitation at a mica mine during an international conference held on the day dedicated to the fight against child labour.
Mumbai (AsiaNews/Agencies) – Mohammad Manan Ansari (pictured) is 14 years old and comes from Samsahiriya, a village in the state of Jharkhand. He began working in a mica mine at the age of eight in the district of Koderma, one of the poorest in the state. Tomorrow he will tell his story at a gathering of the International Labour Organisation on the day dedicated to the fight against child labour.
Manan’s story is like
that of many other children in his village; like theirs but not the same as
their because he is able to talk about it in the past thanks to the action of
an Indian NGO, the Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA), which convinced his parents to
take boy out of the mine and put him into a rehabilitation centre in Jaipur to
study.
“More than half the
children of our village are engaged in mica mining and so are their parents.
The youngest are 6-7 years old,” Manan said.
Families in
Samsahiriya on average have ten members who are employed in the ‘khadan’, the
mine.
Some of the ore can
be found on the surface but a good deal has to be dug out of the bowels of the
earth through tunnels. In the past some tunnels have collapsed killing miners.
For Manan a working
day would begin at 10 am and last until 6 pm.
The day's haul would
then be sold to agents, the price varying according to the quality. A kilo of
ore could sell for as low as 4-8 rupees or as a high as 20 rupees (US$ 40
cents).
His life was like
this until four years ago when the BBA got him to Jaipur to study.
Since then he has
been on a mission to defend children’s rights. Whenever he visited his family,
he tried to convince other families to let their children go to school instead
of the mine. So far eight did.
“I would tell them
that if they didn't allow their kids to study, the next generation too will
suffer,” he said. Even though “it took many attempts” in the end “they were
convinced.”
No comments:
Post a Comment