Dalits and poor people of far western hills continued to be trapped in bonded labor, with powerful people exploiting the tradition.
-Basanta Pratap Singh : Centre for Investigative Journalism-Nepal
Gopal Nepali, a resident of Biskhet in Thalara Rural Municipality-6, Bajhang district, had been a Haliya or bonded tiller of Joshi household after his grandfather failed to clear debts. The backbreaking work took a toll on him and he died 12 years ago. At the time, Gopal was only 45.
On September 6, 2008, two years after Gopal’s death, the government abolished the Haliya system. The government also announced that it will clear the loaned money that the bonded tillers owed and launched initiatives to rehabilitate former Haliyas.
Gyana Nepali, Gopal’s wife who had been raising her five children singlehandedly after her husband’s death, was elated by the news. She started to dream of sending her children to school even in the midst of crisis. But after her son Shyam turned 9, her landlord put her under pressure to pay the debts.
It had been four years since the death of her husband. Having not contributed to the plowing of fields after her husband’s death, her debts of 30,000 rupees increased to one hundred two thousand rupees as interest accumulated over the loan. A woman raising five small children, she was not capable of paying the loan. Aware of her helplessness, the landlord forced her to send her son to plow the field.
“He was too young to handle the job. But if I didn’t send him to work in the field, every year, I had to pay 30-40,000 rupees in interest. So I sent him with a heavy heart,” she said.
Shyam was a fifth generation tiller at the Joshi household. But even after forcing her under-age son to work in the field, Gyana continued to face hardship. The bus Shyam was travelling home from the district headquarters of Chainpur two years ago met with an accident. A steel rod had to be inserted in his broken leg, which has yet to fully recover.
After the accident, Shyam couldn’t plow the field. The interest on the loan, meanwhile, kept rising. And, she kept on borrowing money from her landlord, with the final debt reaching 5 lakh rupees. “If he works a little, his leg gets swollen. The landlord wants us either to work or pay the debt. It feels like we live in a jail,” she said.
A false dawn
When government announced their (Haliya) emancipation, it defined the term ‘Haliya’. According to the definition, Haliya means farm-worker such as shepherd and tiller who carry out various tasks during paddy farming and is engaged in the work for entire year or half after he himself, his family or his ancestors took loan from landlords and is unable to pay loan. After defining the Haliyas, who were poverty-stricken and experienced a wretched life in the far-western region and western region, the government announced the liberation on September 6, 2008.
A Haliya family of Thalara Biskhet shows their Haliya ID card under category ‘D’
Under Haliya system, landlords issue loans to poor people with high interest rate and force the debtors and their offspring to work as bonded laborers. Taking advantage of the tradition, well-off people in the far-western region have continued to exploit poor and landless people including Dalits.
The recent Criminal Code has also criminalized the system. According to the Article 164 of the Code, no one should be bonded as a result of his or her ancestors’ debt. The perpetrator will be imprisoned for three years and faces a fine between 3000 rupees to one hundred thousand rupees. But despite the law, the practice continues in the far-western region.
Giri Damai, a 66-year-old of Biskhet, is another victim. His father Jahari had borrowed money from Surendra Joshi’s family to marry him off. Later, he borrowed some more amounts for household expenditure, with the total amount Rs 25,000 .His whole life, Jahari plowed his landlord’s field to pay back 25,000 rupees.
After his father’s death, Giri followed his footsteps. After he grew old, he sent his 12-year-old son Dinesh to till Joshi’s field. The men from three generations have already served as Haliya at Joshi’s farms, but they still face the Rs. 25,000 debt. “We are forced to plow the field until the debts are cleared,” Giri said, “The father passed away after years of farm-work. I spent my life tilling the field. My son will try to pay the loan. If he cannot, he too will die with debts.”
Having worked in the fields of the landlord throughout the year, Haliyas do not get the opportunity to work elsewhere. How can they pay the loan when they cannot elsewhere? “If you don’t work for a year, they will double the interest,” said Padam Damai, a Haliya. “Our life revolves around farm work. The whole village is trapped with debt.”
To earn money so that he could clear the debts, Padam went to India, where he worked as a daily wage worker for two years. When he returned home after two years, his landlord had increased the interest of Rs. 15 thousand to Rs. 80,000. “I thought I would be able to pay back the loan, but when I came back, the amount had soared. My saving wasn’t enough,” he said.
A Haliya in Chhabis Pathibhera Rural Municipality
Eighteen Dalit families in Biskhet village still plow the field of their landlords to pay the loan. If they don’t, they are charged with 5 percent interest every month. They are also abused and scolded by their landlords. They do not have a piece of land in their name. They live in outhouses in their landlord’s property. “They say ‘we have provided our land for your house; if you don’t do what we say, you will be uprooted’. We have to quietly tolerate all this,” Kalu Damai said.
Though the government announced that it will clear the debts of Haliyas as part of their emancipation, Surendra Joshi, one of the landlords, said they had yet to receive it. Joshi said, “When they need money such as for the wedding of their children or household expenses, they borrow from us. Earlier, they used to work the field, but now they do not even do that. They also do not return the money. Some have fled to India.” Joshi said he has loaned from Rs 25,000 to Rs. 40,000 to 3-4 families. “They may have helped us on farm work because we do so for years. But we haven’t forced them as Haliyas.”
Life full of hardship
Motihara Damai of Durgathali Rural Municipality-7, Gairagaun, a district of Bajhang is a matriarch of a 14-member family including three sons, two daughters-in-law and nine grandchildren. But her house hardly covers two square meters, not enough for cooking and sleeping for such a large family. “We spend the night by just sitting,” she said. “If all of us are together, we don’t even have space to sit down.”
A house belonging to Haliya in Gaira of Durgasthali Rural Municipality. 76 people of 11 families live in the house
Among the 203 Dalit families in the village, who earn wages by plowing the non Dalit people’s fields, tailoring their clothes, and engage in ironwork and leather work, around 164 face predicament similar to Motihara’s. Since they don’t have land, they live in other’s property. “The wages from the landlord is not enough for two months. If we get some daily wage work, we make a living. If not, we borrow money,” Nammu Kami, a local said. According to him, for their 12 months of labor, they receive 2 to 4 quintal of wheat and rice.
Chabis Pathibhera is a 15-minute walk from Gairagau. Some 118 Dalit families live here. 92 of these families have no land. According to a Dalit profile prepared in 2015 by Bajhang district development committee, 1,683 families, who don’t have their own land, are designated Haliya and Khaliya.
In Bajhang, more than 15 villages are home to Haliyas who have been trapped in loan from their ancestors. They are in huge numbers in Bhulwada, Lwarwada, Khaula, Khula, Sunikot of Talkot Rural Municipality,Rilu, Masta, Bhatekhola, Dugrakot, Ranada of Masta Rural Municipality, Dhandagaun, Chhayala, Bhandar, Hemantwada, Rithapata of Jayaprithvi Rural Municipality and Udaypur, Jhuteda, Lwada, Byansi of Chhabis Pathibhera and Gaira of Durgathali Rural Municipality. Other villages with large number of Haliyas include Biskhet, Malumela Parakatne of Thalara Rural Municipality, Bagthala, Deura, Bhamchaur, Bhairabnath of Kedrashyu Rural Municipality, Khiratadi, Pipalkot Deulikot, Khaptad Chhanna, Gadraya, Lamatola, Kalukheti, Pauwagadhi, Patadev of Bungal Rural Municipality. An estimated 1200 Haliyas live in these villages. Their existence 10 years after the government abolished the system is a mockery of the announcement.
Powerful beneficiaries
According to the data collected by the District Land Revenue Office and the NGO Haliya Mukti Samaj’ in 2009, the number of Haliyas in the district was 2,848. Based on that, the Committee for Resettlement of Freed Haliya under the Ministry of Land Reform and Management certified 2168 Haliyas.
A Haliya settlement in Chhabis Pathibhera Rural Municipality-5
Among those verified, the authorities handed IDs to 1663 Haliyas including 71 under category A, 418 under category B, 19 under category C and 1145 under category D. The Freed Haliya Resettlement and Action Plan, 2013, has classified those who don’t have land and house as A, those with house but without land as B and those with land but without house as C and those with both as D.
According to these criteria, the Haliyas of Biskhet should have come under B category. But they were listed in the D category. That’s because powerful people were listed under the categories A, B and C.
After abolition of Haliya system, the government paid the loan they owed to their landlords. It also provided land to the landless. It bought houses for the homeless. It spent millions of rupees in the scheme. Many organizations also spent large amount in order to make Haliyas self-reliant. But a vast majority of Haliyas continued to plow the fields of their landlords. Upon investigation, we found out that the benefits from both the government and NGOs went to people who had access to power. “Those people who had access to officials in district headquarters benefited from the scheme. There was no one to speak for us,” said Chakhudi Damai.
According to Dalit rights activist Dinesh Nepali, most of the people who are included in the list and have been certified are relatives of officials and employees of Haliya Mukti Samaj. “Those who are not Haliyas are listed as beneficiaries whereas the real ones still plowed their landlord’s field,” he said.
Krishna Bahadur Bohra, head of the district land revenue office, admitted that “people who could keep others as Haliyas have been listed under category A.” He added, “I am surprised how these data were collected.” Rabi Sarki, the supervisor of the scheme, knows the answer. “This is what happens when data is collected in random manner. It did injustice to many. Those who were not classified were listed under category A whereas those who should have been listed were pushed to category D,” he said.
Chakra Bahadur Sarki, chairman of Haliya Mukti Samaj in Bajhang, claimed that there was no fault in data collection. But, his statement reveals that it is a disgrace in it. “Someone might have earned money or found a job and kept Haliyas. But ancestors of all Dalits of Bajhang were Haliyas at some point,” Sarki said, “Now it might appear that well-to-do people have benefitted from it, but in the past, they had been Haliyas.”
Rs. 150 million spent after flawed statistics
We found out examples of widespread negligence while collecting data of Haliyas. The enumerators of Haliya Mukti Samaj had listed 79 Haliyas including Githe Od, Ram Bahadur Parki, Gajam Sarki, Bhale Kami of Thalara Rural Municipality-9. A meeting presided by Chiranjibi Thapa, deputy chief district officer and coordinator of district data collection committee, certified them as Haliyas. But when a team from District Land Revenue Office reached the village to hand out the fund, the people listed were not found to be residing there. The names were fake.
Haliya families gathered in Udaypur village of Chhabis Pathibheraa Rural Municipality to share their stories of debt-ridden life
The enumerators even didn’t make it to Chabis Pathibhera-6 and Durgathali Rural Municipality-7. According to Mohan Lal Bika, ward chairman of Chabis Pathibhera-6, the enumerators didn’t arrive at the village after someone told them there weren’t any Haliyas in the village. “More than 200 Haliyas live here. But they are not included in the list,” he said. Despite such huge discrepancy in data collection, there were no attempts to correct it. Instead, the local authorities spent 150 million rupees based on the flawed statistics.
The district land revenue office spent 286 million rupees for 88 Haliyas to build houses (3 hundred 25 thousand for each household), 220 million rupees to purchase land for 110 Haliyas (2 hundred thousand rupees for each household) and 154.725 million rupees to repair houses for 833 Haliyas (one hundred 25 thousand rupees for each household). In total, the District Land Revenue Office spent 154.725 million rupees on house construction, land purchase and renovation of houses. In addition to this, there’s no record of money spent under headings such as skill and capacity development, income generation, education and health.
As a result, people such as Gyana are suffering under an oppressive system, which ensnares underage boys like Shyam as a Haliya for debts passed on from their ancestors.
