Little Hands Of J&K's Tribal Community Toil To Support Families

Under the genial warmth of the spring sun, 10-year-old Riyana Banoo is grazing a few goats near her mud house in Bajalta, a somnolent village located on the outskirts of Jammu city. Soon her father shows up and moves the herd towards the other side of the pasturage.

Banoo not only helps her father in grazing goats but also does other menial jobs to help the family financially.

Belonging to the nomadic Bakerwal community, Banoo’s family — her parents and two younger siblings—struggle hard to make ends meet.

"My father alone can't feed us," says Banoo.

The family along with their livestock moves to alpine meadows in April and returns to Jammu in October as part of the community’s seasonal migration.

“Now we are making preparations for our bi-annual migration towards the upper reaches of Pir Panchal,” said her father Mohammad Kallu.

Besides goat-rearing, Kallu works as an agricultural labourer in Shopian and its adjoining villages on their seasonal migration to the Valley. During the harvesting season, Banoo also works in the vast apple farms of the local orchardists and the money she earns provides a little supplement to her family's main income. Banoo had never been to school and she seems a similar future to her younger siblings.

“We are poor people. Our parents can't afford our education,” she said.

A few hundred metres away from Banoo’s mud house stands a similar hut. The house belonged to another disadvantaged nomad Abdul Rasheed. His 14-year-old- daughter Shamshada is a school dropout.

After the death of her mother, Shamshada had to take full responsibility for managing the family chores, spurring her to leave her studies. Her two elder sisters--Naseema and Sadia—dropped out of school in classes 7 and 8 respectively. They, according to Shamshada, were married at a very young age.

The children from the tribal community in Jammu and Kashmir

Apart from rearing cattle, her father also works as an unskilled labourer to add to his scant income.

Since last year, Shamshada too began working on farms, particularly in Kashmir.

"I worked a month during the last harvest season fetching me Rs 400 per day," she said.

She, however, added that she had to work long hours.

Mohamad Haneef, a local Bakerwal journalist whose family shuttles between Jammu's Sidhra town and Warwan Valley in district Kishtwar said that the community was lagging on both the educational and economic counts.

The tribe and child labour

The Gujjar-Bakerwal is a nomadic pastoral community of Jammu and Kashmir with a population of around 1.5 million people. The community constitutes the third largest ethnic group in the region and was accorded Schedule Tribe status in 1991.

While Gujjars are buffalo and cow herders and also possess some agricultural land, the Bakerwals rely on rearing sheep and goats for their livelihood.

More or less the entire Gujjar-Bakerwal community has been living in extreme poverty and enduring social prejudices for decades.

According to the 2011 census, only 17.8 per cent of the Gujjar-Bakerwal population could read and write. A study carried out by Tribal Research and FCultural Foundation ( TRCF) in 2007 pegged child labour among the community at a staggering 74 per cent.

Dr Javaid Rahi, a tribal researcher and founder of TRCF said that although child labour witnessed over the recent years due to various government programs, the percentage is still very high.

Child labour is more common among the Ajjhari and Manjhi (Ajjhari are the shepherds who tend to goats belonging to affluent Bakerwals, while Manjhi rears the livestock of well-off Gujjars) The 2007 study revealed that around 83 per cent of their children had never been to schools.

There are a host of reasons for the prevalence of child labour among the Gujjar-Bakerwal community. Extreme poverty and tough tribal lifestyle are seen as the key reasons.

"Due to abject poverty, the children have to work at a very young age to support their families," said Rahi.

In large tribal families, the children are made to share the responsibility of their families when they are as young as 10 or 11. Initially, they work in their households and help in tending to their livestock but later they work as domestic helpers and agriculture labourers.

Another reason for child labour is the custom of polygamy among the tribe. Most members of the community marry more than once in their life. The community members believe that having more spouses or bearing more children simply means more hands to work.

Showkat Choudhary, provincial vice president of Jammu and Kashmir Gujjar-Bakerwal Youth Conference, however, said the trend is on the decline among the new generation of the tribal community.

Over the past few years, many tribal families began working in the unskilled service sector to earn more, which has also led to a rise in child labour.

“Now you could see tribal children working inside small tea stalls and hotels across the region”, said Choudhary.

Accesses to schools

As the community is always on the move, their children have barely any access to schools. The government opened up mobile schools for them in late 1970 to offer education to nomadic children. In 2008, the government came up with the idea of seasonal schools and set up such schools in various districts across Jammu and Kashmir. Presently over 33504 students are enrolled in these schools. The government engages hundreds of teachers called educational volunteers to teach in these schools.

However, the community believes that these schools do not function like proper institutes and that the paltry remuneration paid to volunteers demotivates them to work efficiently.

“The functioning of these schools is not being monitored. The government does not conceive the policies properly”, said Rahi.

(Gulzar Bhat is an independent journalist based out in Jammu and Kashmir. This article has been supported by Work: No Child's Business)