Social activists say that attempts to rehabilitate sex workers in this former monarchy call for special efforts to uplift the Badi, a Hindu caste that has for centuries been associated with entertainment and prostitution.

Badi sex workers await rehabilitation. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

Sabitri Nepali was initiated into the traditional vocation of the Badis before she turned 14. Now, at 30, she is baffled by the changes taking place in a country struggling to climb out of a feudal past and transform into a modern, democratic republic.

“My family has survived on this trade for generations. My mother was a sex worker and I continued with the family profession. It was normal for us,” Sabitri tells IPS in this remote village in Kailali district, 700 km west of Kathmandu.

Badis, estimated to number 50,000, live in the western districts of Nepal but find work in the towns and cities of Nepal and neighbouring India, including Kathmandu, Mumbai and New Delhi.

Four years ago the Nepal government banned the Badis from pursuing their traditional occupation after it came under pressure from local communities fearing that the districts where there were Badi concentrations were turning into red light areas.

But, the government made no move to implement the ban, with the result that local communities formed monitoring groups backed by vigilantes that used violent methods to compel the Badis to give up their sole means of livelihood.

“We defied the ban and continued with our traditional occupation. How could we survive without incomes? Think about our children,” says Kalpana Badi,35, who like many others uses a surname that readily identifies her caste and her profession.

The word ‘badi’ is a corruption of the Sanskrit word ‘vadyabadak’, meaning one who plays a musical instrument, and suggests a degradation in the status of the caste over time.

South Asia’s rigid caste system once defined the occupation that people could engage in and Badis formed one group that has been unable to find its way out of an unfortunate position on the social ladder. “We didn’t want to continue with prostitution but the government has failed to fulfill its promises of rehabilitation,” says Bishal Nepali, husband of a Badi sex worker.

The government did announce a package that included housing, income generation activities and scholarships for Badi children, but these were never implemented.

“This has been a very frustrating process. We don’t know why the government has been so indifferent. The Badis are in a desperate situation,” says Uma Badi, a prominent activist and one of a handful of college-educated Badi women.

“Most Badis are uneducated and have no farms or livestock,” Uma explained.

Badis were denied citizenship until 2005 when the Supreme Court ordered the government to grant it to them and also extend financial support.

According to a study published in 1992 by Thomas Cox, an anthropologist then attached to Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan University, Badi girls “from early childhood, know, and generally accept the fact, that a life of prostitution awaits them.”

Badi girls, the study said, do not get married and commonly bear the children of their clients.

Cox recorded that upper caste Nepali society gives little encouragement to Badi girls to pursue other professions and those among them who enter public schools are “often severely harassed by high caste students.”

Two decades after Cox’s study, the Badis, as members of an ‘untouchable’ Dalit (meaning broken people) caste, are still not permitted use of the village water pump or well and their situation may have worsened.

In Muda village, many Badi girls and women have fled their homes fearing the Muda Anugaman Toli Samiti (a vigilante group) whose members have been accused of beating up Badis and their clients.

Badis are not allowed to run legitimate businesses. “People fear to buy anything from my shop because they fear the villagers,” says Dinesh Nepali, a Badi male who runs a small shop selling cigarettes, vegetables and soft drinks. “How can we survive like this?”

Badi activists are aware that they are prime targets for the United Nations Millennium Development Goals that deal with women’s rights, education and poverty, and that their uplift calls for extraordinary and determined initiatives.

“A handful of non-government organisations and donor agencies have been supporting the empowerment of Badi women, but that is not sustainable. Projects come and go but only government support can provide a long-term solution,” says Uma.

There were hopes that the abolition of the monarchy in favour of republican democracy, at the end of the bloody 1996-2006 civil war, would bring positive changes to the lives of the Badis, but Nepal is still coping with political instability.

“I have met three different prime ministers in the past few years,” said Uma. “They promise support but forget us as soon as we head back to our villages.”

In 2007, Badi activists threatened to march naked through Kathmandu to embarrass the government into implementing the court-ordered rehabilitation, but that brought nothing except more promises.

The local monitoring committees – that are backed by the vigilantes – admit that the government has failed in its promise to help the rehabilitation of the Badis.

“We are trying to help the Badi women start new dignified lives but we do admit that there are no viable alternatives,” says Riddha Bhandari, a leader of Muda’s monitoring group. “The government needs to act now.”

Bhandari denied that the Muda committee was out to destroy the Badis, but said there were worries over adverse influences on non-Badi girls and the possible spread of HIV/AIDS.

By Naresh Newar
DANG, Nepal , Apr 20 2012 (IPS)

Five years after Nepal abolished Kamalari, a system of girl slavery, thousands of young women are still awaiting promised rehabilitation and support from the new democratic republic.

Some 11,000 ‘liberated’ Kamalari girls, many of them from this impoverished southwestern district, hope to see some of the money accumulating since 2006 when the Supreme Court ordered the setting up of a fund for the welfare of the girls and their families.

In 2011 alone, the government allocated close to 2.5 million dollars towards the rehabilitation of the girls, which covered scholarships, vocational training and residential support.

But, so far, not even 70,000 dollars have been spent on the welfare of the former slave girls, according to the Mukta Kamalari Bikash Manch (Free Kamalari Development Forum), a network the girls have formed to fight for their rights.

“We know that there is a huge amount of money set aside for us, but we haven’t seen any of it being used for our rehabilitation,” says 20-year-old Urmila Chaudhary, a former slave girl who was rescued after 10 years of bondage in a wealthy Kathmandu household.

Speaking with IPS in Dang, some 200 km southwest of the capital, Urmila recalls how she was sold into slavery by her parents when she was barely six and deprived of a childhood.

In 2008, Urmila was rescued through the efforts of Friends of Nepal (FNC) and Nepal Youth Opportunity Foundation (NYOF), non-government organisations (NGOs), that jointly rescued over 11,000 girls from extreme exploitation.

Since then, she has been a leading activist against the Kamalari system, pressurising the Nepal government to fulfill its promise.

Introduced during the 1950s, mostly in the five districts of Dang, Banke, Bardiya, Kailali and Kanchanpur in Nepal’s southern plains called the Terai, the Kamalari system was the only way the Tharu ethnic group could pay back debts owed to exploitative landlords.

While Tharu adults and male children were forced to work under a parallel bonded labour system, called ‘Kamaiya’, in the landowner’s farms and household, the girls were sold off under Kamalari.

Young Tharu girls were systematically sold off through middlemen to households in the capital and other major cities on verbal contracts that provided for the payment of 50-70 dollars a year to the parents.

“Rescuing the girl children was a huge breakthrough, but sadly, the girls never received much support from the government,” says Som Paneru, executive director of NYOF.

“We have to start a nationwide protest movement soon and we will take to the streets in the capital to push the government to help former Kamalari,” says Bhagiram Chaudhary, director of Society Welfare Action Nepal (SWAN), an NGO in Dang.

The neglect of Kamalari girls squarely blots the Millennium Development Goals pertaining to education and poverty. Although Nepal boasts of progress in the two concerned MDGs, there are wide disparities among ethnic groups and between rural and urban populations.

The MDGs are eight development goals that United Nations member states are committed to achieving by 2015. The first three pertain to eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education and promoting gender equality.

Kamalari girls, due to the extreme poverty of their families, are unable to attend schools and most go hungry, according to activists.

Although enrolment rates in Nepal’s primary schools now stand at 93.7 percent, over 200,000 children from the most marginalised and hardest to reach are out-of-school, according to the MDG Progress Report 2010. NGOs say that most of those out-of-school are from among the Kamalari. “So far, I have only received seven dollars for a whole year and I don’t know what to use the money for,” says Kalpana Chaudhary, a young Kamalari who fears that she will have to drop out of school soon.

“Though they have freedom and no longer have to wake up to slavery each day, they often go to bed hungry,” Urmila said.

Activists fear that the girls will be compelled to return to working as slaves since their impoverished parents cannot afford to take care of them. NGOs like SWAN, NYOF and FNC are struggling to help them, but their funds are limited.

“At the NGO level, we are trying to help with their education and support for their families, but we have limited resources,” says Chaudhury at SWAN.

Chaudhary estimates that the cost of keeping a Kamalari girl in school is about 15 dollars a month. He and the activist Kamalari girls have often travelled to Kathmandu to visit the education ministry, but have only succeeded in spending more resources.

“The government should be taking the responsibility, and they have the funds. We cannot say when we will receive the promised money,” says Urmila. “The parents often scold their girls for coming back home instead of working to support the families.”

Some officials lay the blame on prolonged political instability. The former monarchy is still struggling with a difficult peace process that followed the end, in 2006, of a bloody civil war that lasted a whole decade.

“The price of freedom has been quite high for us, and while we enjoy so much from liberation, our struggle to lead a new life is yet to begin,” says Urmila.

Women affected by HIV in western Nepal stick together to survive. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Naresh Newar
RAKAM KARNALI, Western Nepal, Apr 11 2012 (IPS)

Life, already hard in Nepal’s remote western region, is getting worse thanks to HIV infection brought back by men who go to neighbouring India for seasonal work.

Worst hit are the region’s women, many of whom have had to sell off their land and livestock to get HIV treatment for their husbands and, in many cases, for themselves.

Rakam Karnali is typical of the small hamlets that dot the hilly mid-west and far-west regions that are home to most of the seasonal migrants who cross over to India, a country which provides passport-less entry to Nepalis.

The destination for millions of semi-skilled and unskilled Nepali workers, India has 2.5 million people living with HIV/AIDS. Its big cities are also hubs for sex workers recruited from Nepal’s poverty-ridden regions.

“Nowadays, the men only come back with HIV/AIDS and bring more suffering to the family,” Jala Majhi, who is HIV positive, tells IPS.

Jala said women like her once dreamed of an end to grinding poverty by sending their husbands and able men to work abroad, but too many are coming back with the virus. “The wives not only become widows but are left destitute and infected with HIV/AIDS.”

“I don’t know how much longer I will live. I have accepted my fate, but I am very worried about my children,” says Purna Biswakarma, a 35-year-old widowed by HIV and living with the virus in this remote village.

Western Nepal has a history of neglect by governments in Kathmandu, resulting in deeply ingrained poverty. At least half the population of the region lives below the poverty line with the situation distinctly worse compared to other parts of this least developed country.

According to Nepal’s 2011 census, out of a total population of 26.7 million people, almost two million are working abroad causing hardships to households, but providing badly needed remittances.

Nepal’s 2010 progress report for the United Nations Millennium Development Goals predicts that the target of bringing poverty levels in the country down to 21 percent will be met by 2015.

Nepal, according to the progress report, has also succeeded in stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS, one of the eight MDGs, but ground realities in western Nepal appear to be far different.

It is common to see women widowed by HIV forced to work as labourers, in western Nepal, though even this is difficult because of social stigma attached to HIV and fears of contracting the virus among villagers.

“When my husband died, the villagers guessed that he succumbed to AIDS and I was blamed for that,” says 35-year-old Nani Devi Shahi, who was ostracised by the community and forced to live in isolation for many years.

“I was infected by my husband, but people accused me of being a sex worker and infecting more men,” said Jala.

The villagers banned her from walking near their homes and using public taps. Her mother-in-law finally threw Jala out of the house along with her young daughter.

Rakam Karnali village mirrors the harsh reality of Nepal where HIV positive women are stereotyped as having contracted HIV through immoral behaviour and blamed for spreading the disease.

Women infected with HIV are denied access to resources in their own households, according to the report ‘Women and HIV/AIDS – Experiences and Consequences of Stigma and Discrimination-Nepal’, published by Family Health International in 2004. That situation has barely changed.

“After all these years of sensitisation campaigns all over the country there has been little impact, especially for women living in remote areas as society is unwilling to change,” says Rani Devi Bohara, a community social worker.

Bohara blames apathy on the part of the government and development agencies towards the women who live with the multiple traumas of HIV infection, social stigma and extreme poverty.

According to the government’s National Centre for AIDS and STD Control (NCASC), women in the 15-49 age group form over 28 percent of the estimated 55,000 people living with HIV in the country.

“What is needed is not just anti-retroviral medicines but psychological counselling for both the victim and her family as also income generation support and welfare programmes,” she says.

A comprehensive package can be run for such women through the existing system of Voluntary Counselling and Testing (VCT) centres, which are low-cost and needs only a few trained staff, says Bohara.

“Most of the remote villages don’t have VCTs and the few that exist are so poorly run that they hardly make a difference in the lives of these badly traumatised women,” said Ganashyam Bhandari from the HIV/AIDS Alliance, a non-governmental organisation.

Extreme poverty means that the women cannot afford to travel to CD4 count (immune strength testing) centres of which there are just 13 in the country, most of them in urban areas.

“We have been lobbying for travel allowances to be given to HIV positive people, especially those living in the remote areas, but we have not been successful,” Hemant Chandra Ojha, a senior NCASC official, told IPS.

“In this situation we have no choice but to try and survive somehow,” says Nani, leader of a group of widows living with HIV. “The government is not going to help us.

“We do have a united voice now,” says Nani, referring to her group, which resists social discrimination and has learned the value of standing together.

Battered Nepali women catch a moment together. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Naresh Newar
DAILEKH, Nepal, Apr 5 2012 (IPS)

Women in Nepal’s remote rural areas stood shoulder-to-shoulder with their men during the bloody 1996-2006 civil war that overthrew an oppressive monarchy, but many now battle domestic violence at home.

Rachna Shahi was only 15 when she joined the Maoist People’s Liberation Army in 2004. Today, she finds herself kicked out by her husband’s family and under pressure to grant him a divorce while her own family refuses to take her back.

“I joined the war to fight for women’s equality and our rights but many women like me are now at the receiving end of both family and society,” Rachna tells IPS. “I don’t know how I will survive now.”

Dhanasara Majhi, who also lives in this remote district 700 km west of Kathmandu, would have committed suicide, except that she does not want to leave her four children to the mercy of their abusive father.

“Sometimes I am tempted to kill myself, as that would end all my sufferings. But who will take care of my children after I die?” she asks wiping her tears and sobbing softly.

Her husband, Keshab Majhi, hits her with anything he finds handy such as an iron rod or a hammer and has even threatened to kill her with an axe.

Majhi gets particularly violent after he drinks alcohol. “We usually run towards the hills and hide in the forest until he is sober,” says Dhanasara. She is worried most for her eldest son, 12-year-old Rosan, who shows signs of being mentally disturbed.

Dhansara does not approach the police, fearing that this will enrage her husband all the more and because she knows that she will get no support from the local community. “My neighbours often accuse me of provoking him. I don’t know who to turn to for help.”

Dhansara and Ruchi share the woes of many Nepalese women, especially in the rural areas where they have little or no access to legal protection and end up living in constant fear and daily abuse.

Despite the alarming rate of violence against women, the government has done little to protect them, say women’s rights activists.

In 2011, there were nearly 700 recorded incidents of violence of which 40 percent were cases of domestic violence, according to the Informal Sector Service Centre (INSEC), a non-governmental organistion (NGO).

“Lots of incidents are never reported due to fear of reprisal and lack of access to legal aid,” says Khadga Raj Joshi, regional coordinator of INSEC in the western region.

Last year, 54 women were killed by family members in Nepal for disobeying their husbands or in-laws or for petty reasons such as objecting to their husbands’ drinking. Most of the perpetrators got away scot free for lack of evidence, says INSEC.

The Nepal Bar Association provides pro bono legal services in district courts, but these are too far away for women living in the remote rural areas, says Joshi. “Basically, the women are on their own and have no social protection even from their own families,” says Deepa Bohara, a social worker.

“It is socially acceptable for women to get abused at the hands of their husbands, a really disturbing attitude,” says Deepa.

A 2001 survey conducted by the Nepal demographic and health survey found that a large number of Nepali women, both urban and rural, thought it permissible for a man to beat his wife for not performing kitchen tasks properly, going outdoors without permission or denying sex.

Similar attitudes prevail across South Asia with Nepal’s largest neighbours Pakistan and India, ranking third and fourth respectively, in a global survey of perceptions of threats to women ranging from domestic abuse and economic discrimination to female foeticide.

The survey results, released in June 2011 by TrustLaw, a legal news service run by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, said the fact that “a government is corrupt and that female rights are very low on the agenda means that there is little or no recourse to justice.”

In Nepal, some government support is available to rural women in the para legal services at the Village Development Committees (VDCs), the lowest rung of the rural administration system.

“But, the VDCs have little authority to make any legal decisions and all they can do is encourage a compromise within the family,” says Bindu Khadka, a lawyer with the Forum for Women, Law and Development.

The one hope for rural women is the local police, attached to the country’s 3,915 VDCs, but they often swing in behind the perpetrators as the quickest way to maintain peace.

“We often find that the police, though responsible for prosecution and investigation, pressurise victims to compromise in the name of maintaining peace and harmony in society,” explains INSEC’s Khadka.

“I’m tired of asking the police for help. They do nothing and demand evidence of violence – my word is not good enough,” says 25-year-old Hastana Raut, whose husband abandoned her after three years of marriage.

Nepal, the republic, has seen many legislative reforms in the direction of gender equality ensuring greater economic, citizenship and political rights, safeguarding their sexual and reproductive rights.

Soon after the civil war ended in 2006, Nepal passed the Gender Equality Act giving equal inheritance rights for women and criminalising domestic and sexual violence.

Activists however say that these rights are yet to reach the grassroots levels.

“I feel I will have to live like this for the rest of my life. Who will help me anyway?” asks Pavitra Majhi, 21, whose husband disappeared three years ago, leaving her to be constantly abused by her father-in-law, and beaten by her mother-in-law.