12/8/2022 0 Comments Have a nice life time of land![]() Ramkumari Chaudhari, 45, was also born into a bonded labourer family near Dhangadi. Many of the former bonded labourers now have land in their own name thanks to state sponsored land distribution. With better access to education and healthcare, their lifestyle has also improved. In July 2000, the Nepal government abolished the kamaiya system and liberated some 32,500 bonded labourers from districts in the western plains including Dang, Banke, Bardia, Kailali and Kanchanpur. ![]() “When you have your own land, you reap all the benefits of your labour too, the result of my hard work is mine alone unlike when you slave away at someone else’s farm,” says Jaglal, who has managed to send a son to Romania for work, and bought another plot where he is finally building a home of his own. In 2018, he bought a motorcycle with the money he made from selling the seeds. ![]() Jalal gets four batches of seeds every year in his nursery and makes up to Rs150,000 selling the seedlings. There, for every sapling, he used to get Rs2 and his monthly income rose to Rs25,000.įor the next 13 years, he worked at the Kailali District Forest Office, sent his son to a school with his earnings and even bought a piece of land. Two years later, he was contracted to set up a new nursery for the office. In 2000, he joined the District Forest Office to work in its nursery with a salary of Rs1,500 a month. “We made a small hut but we did not have enough to eat so I remained a kamaiya for a few more years,” says Jaglal but he had already started looking at how to put the land to the best use. Three years later, the family received a 0.3 hectare plot in Kailali. He got married, had a family of his own, but continued working for the landlord with four other brothers who were all also bonded labourers. With no income or property of their own, they had no way of freeing themselves from a life of slavery.īut in 1979, when the Nepal Punarvas Company started distributing land to landless squatters, Jaglal’s father filled in an application. At age 12, he was ‘lent’ to a neighbour’s household to slave away for three years before returning to his original ‘owner’ Shyamlal Chaudhari. The young Jaglal grew up working all day long looking after the zamindar’s livestock at the edge of the forest. This traditional system of modern-day slavery known as the kamaiya system was widespread in Nepal’s western plains until it was abolished twenty years ago. Jaglal, 57, was born into a life of indentured servitude with his parents who were bonded labourers at the house of a local zamindar landlord. Having started a successful nursery, the former landless family is now financially independent. ![]() After living most of his life as a bonded labourer, Jaglal Dagaura Tharu is building a home on a plot of land that he can finally call his own. ![]()
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