NEPALESE LOTTERY BENEFICIARIES TO VISIT UK
Two Anti-Slavery partners from Nepal, who receive funds from the National Lottery’s International Grants Programme, are due to visit London this week. Dr. Shiva Sharma and Deepak Bhatt both work for organisations which seek to end bonded labour in Nepal.

They will visit Britain on their way to Geneva to testify to the UN Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery about bonded labour in Nepal.

Hundreds of thousands of Nepalese are kept in bonded labour, in a perpetual cycle of debt, where a person's labour is demanded as a means of repayment of a loan, or of money given in advance. Bonded labourers are routinely threatened with, and subjected to physical violence, and are kept under various forms of surveillance, in some cases by armed guards.

Although the Government of Nepal recognises that the problem of bonded labour exists, it has not introduced domestic legislation to ban this human rights abuse, nor has it ratified the International Labour Organisation Convention No.29 concerning forced labour.

The story of Khem Ram Labad, from the far western region of Baitadi, illustrates the injustice of bonded labour, also known as debt bondage. Khem Ram Labad has worked as a bonded labourer all of his life, as did his father and his grandfather. When his father died, he inherited his father's debt of 2,500 Nepalese Rupees (£30). He receives no payment because he is allowed to use some of the landlord's land. Like his father and grandfather, he hopes that, one day, the landlord will transfer the land to his name. " Now I have forgotten the real amount of debt which I borrowed all my life for food and clothing, it might be more than 50,000 rupees (£600)". He and his wife, their four sons and their three daughters-in-law are now living in the landlord's cowshed.
Notes to the editors:



Dr. Shiva Sharma and Deepak Bhatta will be in London from 29 June to 2 July and will be available for interviews.

Dr. Shiva Sharma is an academic specialising in agricultural economics and is the general secretary of the Informal Sector Service Centre, one of Nepal's foremost non-governmental organisations. Deepak Bhatt is a founding member of Thagil Social Development Association which works closely with agricultural labourers in one of the most remote regions of Nepal.
28 June 1999 PR/7a/99