Nobel Prize winner Kailash Satyarthi on battling child labor

Kailash Satyarthi

Kailash Satyarthi the Indian Nobel laureate who has spent a lifetime battling child labor, arrives for our early afternoon meeting. “You reached here before me,” he says apologetically, stepping into the small, austere living room of his government-built flat in Alaknanda, a middle-class neighborhood in Delhi.
The 61-year-old founder of Bachpan Bachao Andolan, or Save Childhood Movement, has been in overdrive since October last year, when he and Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of their “struggle against the suppression of children and young people”.
Satyarthi is making the most of his new global profile. He has recently met US President Barack Obama, the Prince of Wales, UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon and other global leaders, urging them to push for the elimination of child slavery to be included in the UN’s new sustainable development goals, now being negotiated. Doors are also opening at home in India, where Satyarthi has spoken to powerful New Delhi political and business elites, students and small town industrialists.
These are crucial audiences in a country where, according to Unicef, about 28m children under the age of 14 are working, around two-thirds in agriculture, especially as New Delhi considers whether to push ahead with a law to ban all employment of such young children.
Satyarthi sinks into one of two black vinyl sofas in the modest sitting area. It is utilitarian, with a few paintings on the white walls. It also has little natural light, so we move outside to bask in the winter sun on a small outdoor terrace lined with potted plants. A bamboo fence offers privacy from a home just a few feet away, across a narrow lane. Settling into the cane chairs, Satyarthi warns, “my wife will come any time and she will definitely insist that you have lunch with us”.
Sumedha Kailash has been an active part of her husband’s crusade but their unlikely union faced stiff resistance. “It was a very revolutionary marriage,” recalls the activist, who was born Kailash Sharma, and adopted the surname Satyarthi, or “seeker of truth”, later.
He was the youngest son of a police constable and illiterate housewife in the small town of Vidisha in India’s Hindi heartland. His future wife was the scion of a prosperous Delhi publishing family.
Satyarthi was an engineering student when he started contributing to one of the magazines published by Sumedha’s family; she was his editor. He met her while visiting Delhi in 1976. Both families objected when they announced their intention to marry. His elder brothers were already receiving proposals from families eager to marry their daughters to an engineer-to-be. Her family didn’t consider a small-town boy from a humble family as an appropriate match, despite his being a Brahmin – on the highest rung of Hinduism’s hierarchical caste ladder. “It was not caste – they were very particular about the status,” he says.
In October 1978, Satyarthi received a desperate call from his sweetheart. Her father had abruptly delivered an ultimatum: the couple could marry in five days’ time – on a Sunday – or forget about each other. Five days later, they married in a simple temple ceremony in Delhi, returning to Vidisha that same night.
It was already clear that Satyarthi would not pursue an engineering career. He had been disturbed by the plight of poor children since his school days, when boys his own age stood on the schoolhouse steps waiting to polish the shoes of arriving students. Aged 11, he displayed an early impulse for social activism, organizing a campaign to collect used textbooks for students whose families couldn’t afford them.
Not all his initiatives worked, however. At 15, he tried to hold a taboo-busting dinner to honor Mahatma Gandhi’s birth centenary, with sweeper women – considered to be “untouchable” –
cooking for high-caste local dignitaries. Yet the guests failed to show, and Brahmin community elders declared Satyarthi an “outcaste”, forcing his own family to bar him from their kitchen or risk being boycotted themselves. “I was given a separate room that opened on the street, and I was not allowed to enter into my kitchen,” he recalls. “I did not care, but it was so difficult for my mother, who used to eat with me every day. She could not do it because she was frightened of the neighborhood.”
After getting married, Satyarthi lectured in engineering for 18 months to earn some money. In 1980 he, his wife and baby son moved to Delhi, where their home was a small storeroom that they sublet from a civil servant. Outside, “they built a kind of shed – half of it was kitchen and half of it was bathroom,” he says.
Satyarthi began writing about social issues for national newspapers, then started a small magazine dedicated to the cause of children, women, and India’s most marginalised people. But when an impoverished brick-kiln worker travelled from Punjab to Delhi seeking help to save his daughter from being sold into prostitution, Satyarthi leapt from journalism to fully fledged activism. He became known for his dramatic, and often dangerous, rescues of children working in industries such as carpet-making, which put the issue of child labor on the political agenda. In 1986, India passed its first law against child labor, banning children under the age of 14 from hazardous industries such as mining and chemicals.
Back in their “storeroom house”, there were frequent tensions. “Many poor people used to come to meet me and my wife, and my wife was cooking food for those whose children were kidnapped or held in bondage,” says Satyarthi. “My landlady
didn’t like it.” After a few years, the family moved to the slum area of Govindpuri, in South Delhi, where they had greater autonomy. Then in 1996, the couple, who had since had a daughter, bought their current home, a 90 sq metre, ground-floor flat built by the Delhi Development Authority, a state agency charged with building affordable housing.
The family home is functional, with two small bedrooms and basic furniture, such as a metal dining table with six chairs. There are lots of family photos and a fine Madhubani painting – the traditional art form of India’s impoverished Bihar state. The sunken sitting area is cosy, with low banquettes, a colourfully covered mattress on the floor, lots of soft pillows with embroidered cushion covers, and a large flatscreen television. Built as an add-on to the original unit, Satyarthi says the inviting nook is now the family’s favorite space.
The couple’s two children are both adults now and live elsewhere, but the house remains an open, busy place, with a constant flow of guests, including work colleagues, visiting activists and others seeking Satyarthi’s help. “In my 35 years of married life, I cannot recall two consecutive evenings when we ate alone. There are always guests. We live like that,” he says. Using the ancient Persian word for a travellers’ inn, he adds, “my house is like a big serai”. By Amy Kazmin

Amy Kazmin is the FT’s south Asia correspondent

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2015