He says the food he grows is sufficient to feed his family for just six months of the year. Children, some as young as five, make up half the workforce in Nepal s 2,000 carpet factories. The Nepali carpet industry employs 10 times more children than the more publicized Indian industry. The average age is 13 but 12,000 are younger than 10. They work 16 hours a day, seven days a week, squashed shoulder to shoulder on wooden planks, breathing air laden with cotton dust.
Half suffer from malnutrition and others are affected by silicosis, early arthritis and eye strain.
But while the Indian Government says publicly that it wants to stamp out child labour, the Nepali Government refuses to recognize it as a problem. According to Bijay Sainju from Child Workers in Nepal, an organization working principally with carpet children, When we try to talk to the Prime Minister about child labour he says we ve eradicated it . The reality is that the export market is controlled by a few big guys who have close links to the Government. Cleaning up keshari Millions of farming families will be saved from the risk of becoming severely disabled as a result of research by Indian scientists into a protein-rich but toxic pulse. Scientists at the National Institute of Nutrition in Hyderabad have produced low-toxin varieties of the crop to be distributed to farmers this year.