Keshar, who is from Kaule village in Chitwan district, was in Kavre with 14 other fellow daily wage laborers and a leader he called “naike” in Nepali, to make a living.
It came to me as a big surprise when Keshar said that he had just turned 20, because he surely looked above 30. I realized that was due to the hardships he faced in life, as a daily wage earner, traveling from one place to another, in search of work.
To some people, destiny gives them such anti-hero roles that they face obstacles in every stage of their lives.
Keshar’s mother died when he was three years old. He grew up in his maternal grandmother’s house herding goats till the age of 12. After this, he joined this profession of daily wage earner, which involves heavy physical work that now offers him daily wage of Rs 200. So he says he makes around Rs. 4,000 if it is a good month providing work everyday.
He told me that this job has taken him to distant places like Pokhara, Lamjung and other districts of western Nepal, besides Kathmandu and Kavre.
At the age of 17, Keshar got married with his village sweetheart. That was three years ago, but he hardly gets the time to spend together with his family, as he remains out of home in search of work most of the year. Even while talking about his stay in this village of Kavre, he is rather quite optimistic that he will be employed till this Dashain, after which he can head home.
As an alternative to his current work, I asked Keshar what he thought of going to India and the Gulf countries for work, like many Nepalis do, looking for greener pastures. He did not show much interest; maybe because of the financial constraints he had for Gulf jobs which required of him to invest more than Rs70,000. He was also not so keen to go to India.
According to him, people from his village rarely go to India and the Gulf. This was a new learning for me as I had heard and seen people joining the Indian army for generations in the western hills of Nepal. In recent times, many youth from the western and eastern hills of Nepal have been working in the Gulf and Malaysia.
Then I directed the conversation to the political front, but he was not very vocal. He, however, admitted that he, along with people from his village, supported the UCPN-Maoists in the last Constituent Assembly (CA) elections. As many in the Nepali Congress claimed, I asked him if there was any coercion from the Maoists to vote for them. He refrained from answering, but I could read that there was some level of pressure used. He said he would support the Maoists again in the next elections.
To my wish to photograph of him, he politely said his clothes were not fine. This made me realize the self-esteem of a person like him.
But even more disturbing was to realize that the person sitting next to me and talking to me did not smile even once throughout our one-hour conversation.
Later, I was even more shocked to know that the group included a 12-year-young boy, Keshar’s stepbrother. The boy said he was there for a month in his summer holidays from school to make some money for stationery, and he would return to study in the fifth grade at his school where his father works as a peon. The boy earns Rs 150 daily.
Thinking of the plight of daily wage earners in Nepal, I am reminded of the recently published UNDP report, prepared by Oxford University, that mentions that Nepal has 65 percent of its population living in poverty, which the National Planning Commission (NPC) found hard to comment on. Although there is no factual data available about the number of daily wage earners in Nepal and their socio-economic conditions, it is easily understandable that their life is miserable. In the absence of the state’s clear mechanism to help them out, the slogans of a poverty-free society have proven to be mere rhetoric. The issues of child labor and labor rights are much loud topics in Kathmandu seminars, but are still not able to go beyond that.
If there was work available in his place, though the kind of work would not have changed due to his lack of skills and training, people like Keshar would, at least, not be forced to become an internal labor migrant, leaving his wife alone at home.
NPC considers people poor with less than US$ 1 of income per day; so people like Keshar may not fall in the category of the “poor” but their life is really wretched. Due to the nature of the job, they cannot even unite themselves in a single organization, which is definitely a major disability at present when only the voices coming from violent groups are heard. To add to the miseries, the frequently occurring bandas take a heavy toll on daily wage earners.
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