By Sudeshna Sarkar, IANS,
Kathmandu : As Nepal celebrates Children’s Day Thursday, pledging to protect child rights, scores of Indian children aged between 10 to 14 years and some even younger are passing through a harrowing time in the neighbouring state due to complexities beyond their understanding.
On Monday, the Kantipur daily carried a front-page photograph of a group of wide-eyed Indian children in the southern Sunsari district near the Indian border, who were said to have been taken by the local people under their control and then handed over to police.
The children’s fault: they were sent to Nepal to be enrolled in schools and madrassas.
The daily reported that a large number of government schools in the border areas are “hiring” children from India to be enrolled as students.
The schools get government aid on the condition they can show a certain minimum number of students. However, with some schools struggling to muster the number, their authorities have hit upon the idea of bringing in children from abjectly poor families in neighbouring Bihar and Uttar Pradesh states to inflate their enrolments.
The children were paid between NRS 100-150, the daily reported.
It also said the schools were falsifying the names of the Indian students and their addresses to draw the state aid.
However, no one is raising the issue of the gross violation of the children’s rights.
Taken to a new country away from home, the children are facing the trauma of being herded up by locals like criminals and then being handed over to police.
It also raises questions about the bilateral treaty of peace and friendship signed between India and Nepal that pledges to treat each other’s citizens as their own.
Nepal’s human rights organisations are yet to raise their voices against the phenomenon, which also falls under human trafficking.
While the sale of Nepali girls and women into the flesh trade in India is well-known, little is known of such trafficking of Indian children in Nepal.
(Sudeshna Sarkar can be contacted at [email protected])