DEVENDRA BASNET

Ten-year-old Hukuma BK hardly flinches as she sits cross-legged in front of a heap of stone, crushing them for most of the day. Though her tender hands are bruised and battered, her eyes glimmer - in the hope of earning enough money to afford a new set of clothes and square meals during the upcoming festival of Teej.

“My parents can´t afford to buy a new set of clothes for me. They have been asked me to earn one myself. Let´s see how much I can earn,” says the child from socially as well as economically marginalized Dalit family from Jaspur village in Rolpa district. Come what may, Hukuma is determined to earn enough money to don red Kurta Salwar this Teej.

After the blacktopping works for the Holleri-Swargadwari road started, Hukuma has been working as a laborer for the past ten days, crushing stones to be used on the road. She earns merely Rs 30 for a tin box full of crushed stones. She has not received any payment for her work so far-but she is confident her hard work will pay off at the end of the day.

Every day she sets out to the quarry early in the morning carrying a hammer and her lunchbox and works indefatigably until the sunset. A few minutes into the conversation, Hukuma reveals that she has no alternative but to toil day in and day out to help her family to make the end meet. So abjectly poor is her family that the fourth-grader at a local public school could hardly afford to go to school even after buying stationeries with her own money. “I rarely go to school. I have to work harder during the vacations and other holidays,” she says.

Not only Hukuma, many families in the locality, faced with similar poverty, are compelled to send their children to work instead of school, says Kamala BK, a local. “Most of the school children in the village have to go for work to support the family,” adds Kamala.

Published on: 16 August 2013 | Republica