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Photos: Nepal workers look to Gulf to escape forced-labour system

Victims of the so-called haruwa-charuwa system try to escape debt bondage, but it’s not so different on the other side as well.

Nepali female farmer
A Nepali farmer entrapped in the haruwa-charuwa system works in the Siraha district, a few kilometres away from the Nepal-India border. The agricultural sector, mainly cereal and livestock, accounts for 25 percent of Nepal’s GDP and provides about two-thirds of total employment to the landlocked Himalayan nation’s 29 million people. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
By Sebastian Castelier and Quentin Muller
Published On 19 Apr 2022

After working for two years in Saudi Arabia, Raj Kumar Mahato returned to his home in Nepal’s Siraha district to become an activist against a forced labour system, locally known as haruwa-charuwa.

Haruwa is a local term to describe a person who ploughs land for others, while charuwa are the workers who herd cattle.

Under the system prevalent in Nepal’s central and eastern Terai region, a belt of flat land stretching along the Nepal-India border, landowners belonging to privileged castes entrap poor villagers in a debt-bondage by providing them loans at high interest rates. Then they compel them to work for them for years, sometimes even generations, as the poor borrowers make vain attempts to repay their loans.

The form of work constitutes forced labour, according to international conventions.

“We are like the medieval serfs serving a king. Our role in life is understood to be servants of rich men who own vast lands but cannot cultivate it themselves,” Mahato, 37, told Al Jazeera.

According to a 2013 report (PDF) on forced labour in Nepal’s agriculture sector, published by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), an overwhelming 95 percent of households employed in the haruwa-charuwa system are victims of forced labour.

Nepal’s Dalit community, the lowest group in the complex Hindu caste system, is the most exploited in the haruwa-charuwa system. Discriminated in every sphere of their lives, poor Dalits fall prey to debt traps laid by landlords belonging to the privileged castes.

The haruwa-charuwa labourers often toil from morning to dusk during the peak agricultural season, but receive minimum compensation for their work.

“We provide farmers small daily wages and loans at a 3 percent monthly interest rate to buy seeds and farm tools they need to cultivate the land. After the harvest, we take 50 percent of the production and they keep the rest,” Amjad Ansari Arnama, a 35-year-old haruwa–charuwa profiteer, told Al Jazeera.

“My family is the village’s biggest landowner, so we invite villagers to work in our agricultural fields. Out of 30 households in the village, about half of them work for us,” said Arnama, who lives in Mahanaur, a village close to the Nepal-India border.

The system makes Mahato furious. “None of this is legal, it is an informal system. We all aspire to be free because honestly, who desires to be rich men’s slave?” he asks.

Nepal’s Bonded Labour (Prohibition) Act, 2002 says “no one shall keep or employ anyone as a bonded labourer”. But the law could not stop debt bondage and forced labour practices in the Himalayan nation.

Many victims saw the prosperous Gulf region as the light at the end of the tunnel. The ILO report says the “opening up of foreign employment opportunities” can lead to the erosion of the haruwa-charuwa system, however modest.

In 2020, Nepal earned $8.1bn from remittances – about a quarter of its gross domestic product (GDP).

Employed by a meat packaging company in Saudi Arabia until 2015, Mahato said Gulf jobs are “better” than the haruwa-charuwa system, but the employee-employer relations are “hardly different”.

“The pay was better, accommodation and meals were provided, but I still worked for a rich person at the end of the day. There is no one to listen to us and our problems, to be compassionate. Being a poor man will always be hard, be it in Nepal or Saudi Arabia,” he says.

Also, migrating to Gulf states is not the silver bullet to escape exploitation. Nepali landowners keep a grip on those fleeing the haruwa-charuwa system, with recruitment agencies charging Gulf-bound workers large sums of money to get them a job, violating Nepal’s law that caps recruitment fees charged on workers to 10,000 rupees ($82).

With no liquid assets in hand to pay the illegal recruitment fees, aspiring workers turn to the same landowners who exploit them to fund their migration at an exorbitant rate of interest. At times, the workers even pledge one of the adult members of their family as collateral.

All the households interviewed by Al Jazeera in the eastern terai region took loans to migrate.

Compelled to wire money back home every month to pay loan instalments, expat workers become victims of abusive working conditions until their loan is repaid.

*Name changed to protect the identity of the interviewee. Ramu Sapkota contributed to this report.

Nepali farmer
Gulf migration is a relatively recent ‘alternative’ to the haruwa-charuwa system and low-income jobs in neighbouring India. It emerged on the back of Gulf states’ oil-fuelled stellar economic growth since the 1970s. It was further facilitated by Nepal's decision in the late 1990s to allow applications for passports in districts rather than at the foreign ministry office in Kathmandu. 'A number of young men used to go for work to India where they could cross borders with just an ID card. In one decision, [government] changed the life of these people. Passports available at district level opened doors to Gulf migration,' said Ganesh Gurung, a Nepali labour migration expert. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
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Nepali farmer
Migration comes with its own set of risks. Poorly educated - only less than 8 percent of men working as haruwa-charuwa have completed primary education - unfamiliar with urban life, most farmers fleeing exploitation lack an understanding of workplace safety requirements and have a higher fatality risk. Pre-departure trainings, mandatory in Nepal since 2004 to provide aspiring migrant workers with country-specific information, including labour laws and ways to minimise chances of workplace accidents, are not always conducted properly. The government authority overseeing labour migration found training providers guilty of flouting rules and issuing fake certificates to workers without conducting the actual pre-departure training. 'Nepalese workers reach major Gulf cities without any kind of prior training or exposure to situations that exist there. Some die as they are hit by falling objects or while trying to mount on tall scaffolds in multi-storey buildings without protective equipment. Such situations could have been prevented,' says Narad Nath Bharadwaj, Nepal’s ambassador to Qatar from 2019 to 2021. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
nepali farm
In case the family of a migrant worker is unable to repay the loan taken to pay recruitment agents, monthly instalments can quickly spiral out of control as a 3 percent monthly interest rate starts to compound. In such a situation, landowners-turned-lenders often gather community members to publicly shame the ‘incriminated’ family, says Mahato, the activist. 'Those public shaming sessions serve as a warning to whoever might intend to elope loan repayment,' he said. He says he had to repay a large sum on top of the 200,000 rupees ($1,630) loan he had taken to migrate to Saudi Arabia. Indebted families unable to repay are forced to toil for free in fields or construction sites owned by landowners. One in 10 haruwa-charuwa farmers is subjected to forced labour work in lieu of interest repayment. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
nepali farmer
Despite victims of the haruwa-charuwa system joining nationwide anti-constitution protests in 2015, little progress has been made. 'Few oppose the haruwa-charuwa system. Who wants to speak up for poor people anyway? Nobody. Rich landowners have to change their mindset regarding slavery; we need to do better. Forget politicians, they have no idea what it is to be a kind of slave. They come around during elections, chanting slogans, promising to eradicate the system, but once elected, they forget us. Will parliament members ever listen to our voices?' asked Mahato. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
nepali farmers
Haruwa-chaurwa was not the only forced-labour system in Nepal. In the western region, landless agricultural labourers worked in the haliya system until its abolition in 2009. Yet, few alternative livelihood options and the absence of rehabilitation programmes left people with little choice to free themselves from the haliya system. By virtue of international treaties it ratified, including the Forced Labour Convention of 1930, Nepal is obligated to eliminate forced or bonded labour. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
nepali farmer
'I work about 10 hours a day in the fields. Income varies, but on average I earn about 7,000 rupees ($57) a month, most of which is not paid in cash but rice. This is how the rich man pays me,' said Sita Kumari Pasman, a 32-year-old farmer. Rice is not enough though. Food shortage is a significant blight on haruwa-charuwa households, the ILO study found. Nearly 96 percent of the workers did not have food sufficiency for the whole year. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
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nepali farmer
Migrating abroad to flee the haruwa-charuwa system is a gender-specific privilege. Nepal’s conservative society expects women to take care of household chores and look after children. 'Female migration is stigmatised because it conflicts with Nepal’s patriarchal mindset. People cannot accept women to be the main breadwinner of the family,' says Manju Gurung, co-founder of POURAKHI Nepal, an NGO founded in 2003 to defend the rights of Nepali female migrant workers. 'A woman in Nepal never gets to enjoy her own identity: first she is a daughter, then a wife taking care of her husband’s family. Womanhood has been commodified,' she says. Also, the regulatory landscape is a deterrent. Since 2017, Nepal has barred women from taking housemaid jobs in the Gulf, violating the universal right to mobility in the name of protecting them from the risk of falling prey to abusive employers. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
nepali farmers
Unlike the labour-exporting Indian state of Kerala, where remittances have triggered economic and social development, families of haruwa-charuwa’s migrant workers struggle to invest in productive assets like business or land, nor they can afford to buy a home as loan repayments restrict their remittance-fuelled buying power. 'Sometimes, I fear my two sons will end up in the haruwa-charuwa system. Even if I migrated to Saudi Arabia in 2013 and earned 900 riyals ($240) a month for 27 months, rich people still have the upper hand. Migration money is not enough to get out of their grip,' said Ranjit Kumar Yadav, 37. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
nepali farmer
Amjad Ansari Arnama, a haruwa–charuwa system profiteer, says nobody is forced to work or take loans but they are compelled to do so due to a lack of job opportunities. 'Where is the government? Absent! On the contrary, our family provides employment to local communities. I feel proud, we play an important social role,' he says. The relation between workers and landowners takes various forms, from no contract at all to oral or written agreements, known as 'laguwa', under which, according to ILO, changing employers is not possible until work for the landowner is completed. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
nepali farmers
The haruwa-charuwa communities have become reliant on loans on high interest rates for events such as weddings, paying school fees or hospitalisation, funding migration journey or rituals during cremation ceremonies. 'People get money as per their needs, nobody asks them to take loans,' says Arnama. 'When people are in an urgent situation, we charge them 5 percent per month interest rate. The rate is higher because it is in a hurry. We cannot reduce the interest rate.' [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
nepali farmers
Families often borrow money from landowners to fund marriages. Some communities in Nepal request the bride’s family to give the groom property, cash or valuable assets. The practice, known as dowry and prohibited by Nepal since 1976, is still rampant. Pappu Malik, 22, left, married a woman aged 17, on February 24, 2022, before heading to the Gulf for work. Although the practice has been banned since 1963 and the legal age for marriage is 20, Nepal has one of the world's highest rates of child marriage. According to UNICEF, 40 percent of girls and teens below 18 are married in Nepal. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
nepalese politician
'The haruwa-charuwa system is definitely a problem, but the Nepali government has already eradicated it. We do not allow that kind of system in our country. Still, some people and communities boycott government regulations to force people to work,' said Gokarna Bista, Nepal’s former minister of labour, employment and social security. During his tenure, Bista said, he attempted to crack down on unscrupulous labour migration recruitment practices and increased the country’s minimum wage to make local employment more attractive. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
nepali farmer
Hundreds of kilometres away from Kathmandu, Nepal’s economic powerhouse, the haruwa-charuwa system is alive and kicking. Poor economic development leaves people with limited options and forces them to toil for local landowners or borrow money from them. 'This is not good but what to do? The government fails to create opportunities. Why don’t they rent our lands to build industries on it to provide jobs to the youth?' asks Arnama. Nepal’s 1996-2006 Maoist rebellion that overthrew the 240-year-old monarchy fell short of its promise to institute a new social order and replace the haruwa-charuwa system with a sustainable alternative. 'Maoist leaders rose to the highest levels of government in the name of poor people and then forgot them. They simply no longer care,' says Arnama. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
Nepali farmers
'If our government would provide us job opportunities here, we would not go to the Gulf to work under burning heat, at risk of falling victim to unscrupulous employers. We migrate there because we are poor and wages are more attractive, but personally, I prefer to be a slave here for any rich landowner than migrating abroad. At least I would die in Nepal, surrounded by my community and people I love,' said Rajendra Mochi, a villager. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
nepali farmer
For some, attempts to escape abuse under haruwa-charuwa system take a dramatic turn for the worse. Four months after he landed in Saudi Arabia 15 years ago to work as a construction worker, Abinesh’s father died in his sleep, leaving the family in despair. With no income, Abinesh, whose mother died in childbirth, was forced to work in the haruwa-charuwa system. 'Growing up, I could not get proper nutrition and my body did not develop properly,' Abinesh said. Two-thirds of children subjected to forced labour in the haruwa-charuwa system did not have adequate food every day, ILO found. Nationwide, the UN body found that 1.1 million of Nepal’s seven million children were working in 2018. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
nepali farmer
'We know that labour migration’s economic benefits come at social costs. But we should ask ourselves which one has a larger weight, and we already know the answer: economic development,' Gurung said. Six months after an armed group executed 12 Nepali migrant workers in Iraq in 2004, the labour migration expert met with a group of Nepali workers in India’s capital New Delhi as they awaited their migration to Iraq and Afghanistan. He says he could not fathom what pushed those young men to risk it all. 'One night, a boy, usually silent, told me: 'If I stay in Nepal, at day Nepali soldiers might suspect me of being a Maoist and kill me; at night, Maoists might suspect me of siding with our army and kill me. If I get killed in my village in Nepal, my family gets nothing. At least if I am beheaded in Iraq, my family will receive compensation,' Gurung said. 'It was a calculated risk.' [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]