Friday, March 28, 2014

Plight of the Poor

This appeared in "Republica" Daily on 26 March 2014.


http://www.myrepublica.com/portal/index.php?action=news_details&news_id=71602



Samjhana KC, 25, sells vegetables at an Old Baneshwar crossroad in Kathmandu. It has been five years since she started her business. Before that, she used to be a live-in servant in the house of a middle-class family in Bishalnagar. Hailing from a remote village in Dolakha district, she was brought to Kathmandu some 12 years back while she was very young. The employing family had promised her decent food, clothes and education. She worked for the family for five years and went to another family for three years. During these years, she saved some money and started her own business. She says that she doesn’t want her children to do any household works. 

The culture of keeping live-in servants was ubiquitous few years back in Nepal. Domestic helps used to be easily available to work in upper and middle class families in urban locations. Usually poor people like Samjhana from remote villages were hired as servants. Unskilled workers provided for cheap labor for a long time. Ranging from minors to the aged, these servants did household chores for minimum wages.

According to International Labor Organization’s recent data, domestic helps comprise around 12 percent of the working population in developing countries. The 2013 joint report of The International Domestic Workers Network (IDWN), the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), and Human Rights Watch states that around 40 percent of domestic workers are employed in Asian countries. These workers have been abused and exploited by their employers, the report indicts.

Domestic workers have been found to be living in horrific conditions. Very rich families may provide separate servants’ quarters but middle class families keep servants under staircases or other cramped spaces. Decent food and cloth is rare. The workers have to labor for almost 18 hours a day. Even progressive families have an unwritten rule that servants should not sit on the same furniture or use the same crockery their employers use. 

Servants are vulnerable to violence and sexual abuse. A police officer’s family subjecting a minor worker to brutal torture and underfeeding made headlines few years back. Influential people raping their maids have also been reported. Rather than being subjected to such mistreatments, unskilled laborers prefer to open their own small business as seen in Samjhana’s case above. 


J. Maillard/ILO

Dr Rudra Gautam, associate professor at the Central Department of Economics of Tribhuvan University (TU), had conducted a survey on Nepali domestic workers in 2011. The survey found that there were over 160,000 domestic workers across Nepal. Most of these workers were minors and they had not been paid proper wages. 

United Nations agencies and rights organizations have been pressuring Nepal government to ratify Convention on Decent Work for Domestic Workers. Nepal had voted for the Convention in the 100th session of International Labor Organization. It has, however, shown reluctance in ratifying the Convention and make necessary laws to prevent abuses of workers’ rights. One can’t be sure Nepal will do any good regarding domestic workers’ rights even after ratifying the Convention. Nepal has an excellent track record of ratifying international conventions and making domestic laws but failing to implement them. 

But the trend of becoming live-in domestic servants seems to be changing in the recent years. Families say it has become harder to find live-in staff. Demand is rising as more women go out to work and fewer live in joint families where in-laws act as nannies. Yet supply is falling. Servants, in turn, are more able than before to demand decent working conditions. Wages appear to be rising, causing grumbles among employers. Incidents of servants scampering off with employers’ goods never to reappear have also instilled fear in employers to hire live-in servants. Even live-out servants are hard to find these days.

With the rising demand of unskilled workers in the Gulf countries, many domestic workers have chosen to go abroad. This is another reason for the dearth of domestic workers here. Government of Nepal has made agreement with foreign countries to supply laborers. Mostly women are employed as domestic helps abroad. But their sorrows continue even there. Since this type of work belongs to informal sector, the government cannot even keep track of these domestic workers. Violent cases of sexual harassment and physical torture on Nepali women workers in some Gulf nations at the hand of employers have been reported. An estimated 2.5 million Nepali women work abroad legally and illegally, according to the Women’s Rehabilitation Centre. They have been living in risk.

With the development of new technologies that ease household chores, the need of servants seems to be on the wane. Modern dishwashers, washing machines and dusting equipments have appeared in the market. But despite the availability of such devices, very rich people still keep servants. In an interesting study of employers’ psychology entitled “The Theory of the Leisure Class”, Thorstein Veblen states that even after the appearances of labor-saving devices that would considerably reduce the need for household labor, people hired servants not to relieve themselves of tedious tasks, but to be provided with “conspicuous subservience”. A servant both satisfied the master’s “propensity for dominance” and presented a public “performance of leisure”. The feeling of dominance and submission in master-servant relationship gives pleasure to the employer.

As long as economic inequality remains in the world, practice of hiring servants for domestic chores will continue. The location may shift to the developed world but servants will always be there. 



Saturday, March 8, 2014

Decline of humanities

http://myrepublica.com/portal/index.php?action=news_details&news_id=70712

In one of the stories of the Arabian Nights, an exiled prince, who later becomes a kalandar, is asked by his employer what his skills are. The prince replies that he is a poet and man of letters. “That skill is useless here. Take the ax and collect wood,” enjoins the employer. This anecdote reflects the current situation of humanities studies in Nepal and in other countries.

The studies of humanities suffer as students opt to join other streams. That is why many colleges in Nepal are phasing out humanities. Similar trend exists in universities worldwide. It seems the focus has shifted to business and vocational studies, which is understandable. 

Gone are the days when gaining education meant being able to introspect and ask existential questions. These days one has to be “saleable” in the market. Education that ensures jobs with lucrative benefits is held high. Deliberation on ontological and epistemological meanings is considered unproductive. One has to learn the tricks of the trade in this ever-growing capitalist market-driven society for survival.

Simon During, an Australian Research Professor, in an article in publicbooks.org states that “in 2010, the UK government, in deregulating university fees, simply stopped funding undergraduate teaching in the arts, humanities, and social sciences while maintaining support for engineering, the sciences, technology, and math. Partly as a result, applications for the humanities fell by over 11 percent the following year.”

Similar dearth of students in humanities is seen in Nepali colleges. Deepak Khanal, principal of Bluebird College, Lalitpur, points out three reasons for students’ disinterest in humanities and fondness for management studies. First, management students get jobs quickly after finishing their studies. With the proliferation of financial institutions and banks, these students see a big job market. Second, humanities have been traditionally treated as a stream that students with poor grades join. Those with higher scores opt or are forced to join management or science. Third, there are plenty of optional subjects in humanities and students demand a certain subject, and not the other. The college cannot offer the subject or hire a subject teacher as per students’ demands and students join other streams where all subjects are compulsory. “We used to offer humanities in our college but the dwindling number of students forced us to phase it out,” Khanal says. 

More students enroll in Masters in English than in any other subjects: 1,412 completed their postgraduate in English from Tribhuvan University in 2012 alone. This is significantly higher than the numbers in other subjects in humanities. Sociology still attracts students but political science, history, culture, geography and many other subjects have very few takers. The lure of English exists among Nepali students, maybe because English is the international language and has the potential to fetch lucrative jobs. But the jobs available to English graduates are as teachers, journalists, librarians, translators and foreign education consultants, among others. None of these are attractive in terms of salaries. Jobs in international organizations based in Nepal are lucrative but they follow a tacit policy of “reverse discrimination” so that so-called upper-caste people rarely get these jobs. Other subjects in the humanities stream have even more limited opportunities for jobs.

It is a big disincentive for humanities that students don’t get lucrative jobs but they also lack basic employable skills. Even the English graduates’ writing is not up to the mark. This shortcoming hampers their eligibility in the limited job market. This is because English is taught in Nepali or other local languages in public schools from the very beginning. The instructors themselves are not adequately qualified to impart writing skills. The annual examination system gives no space to test the abilities of the students and to monitor their progress. Moreover, cheating in examinations is an established practice. Thus students with poor academic skills pass with flying colors.

It’s high time that the curriculum be improved so as to incorporate sellable skills rather than focusing on abstruse theories. 

However, there are incompetent students in other streams as well. There are worrying studies pointing to the incompetence of our doctors and engineers. Nepali medical graduates from Chinese universities repeatedly fail the competency exam conducted here. The local graduates fare better in this regard but there have been discouraging reports about massive corruption in medical colleges. Unqualified students easily become doctors by paying hefty fees these days. An empirical study carried out by BR Pahari concludes that “the existing level of graduating engineers from Nepal are not meeting the standard demanded by the market”. This is problematic indeed.

Unemployment rate in Nepal is estimated at around 46 percent. Most of the unemployed are University graduates. The gradual increase of service sector means that many graduates vie for the limited seats. The big pool of applicants in many job openings prove that population has skyrocketed while not enough jobs have been created. No wonder that both skilled and non-skilled youth choose to go abroad searching for jobs. 

The government should ensure favorable conditions for establishing industries (the job creators) and also encourage youths to pursue technical studies. Even the humanities can be improved given a little willpower. 

The author is with Republica’s op-ed bureau
bindesh.dahal@gmail.com