Nepali Labour Law - Children

Nepalese law says: A child is a person who has not completed 16 years of age. Law says, to work in Nepal as a child, you must be at least 14 years old, and that you can work for no more than six hours, and you must not work during 6 p.m. to 6.a.m. hours, you must get a break of 30 minutes after 3 hours of work, and nobody should pressure you to work.

The above law is only written in pages but never enforced. Millions of Nepali kids are employed by their mums and dads for household works to help them all day long instead of attending a school and getting education. Nepal does not punish parents if they fail to send their kids to school starting from a certain age. For example, in the U.S. parents can go to jail if they don't send their kids to school from as early as five years of age. Many kids work in factories such as carpet factories, coal mines, in stone quarryies, in house and road constructions, as an assistant to bus driver and/or bus conductor, as a dishwaser in restaurants, and also as a servant in thousands of mid class to rich class Nepalese homes. Of all the kids working in Nepal most of them are as young as 11 years old, by the law, it means they shouldn't be working at all.

First of all, Nepali Kids don't have the rights to live and grow in a peaceful environment as the county's a decade old war continues. Official records indicate that about 500 innocent kids have died in the war conflict and millions are affected by the war. Many have lost their parents or someone in the family, or have parents unable to make ends meet. Extreme hardship life pushes the Nepali kids into labor.

Child Labour Facts:

• Nepal's Economic activity by boys and girls aged 10 to 14 is 42.07%. Nepal is the world's 6th child labour country.
• About 3 million Nepali children are working under the extreme hardship
• Of all the child labours, nearly 60% are girls
• Half of the country's children have no access to primary school
• About 5000 kids work and sleep on the streets
• Nearly half the kids in Nepal work
• Girls work longers hours than boys
• More than 10,000 girls are trafficked every year
• 20% of the sex workers in Nepal are under age of 16
• 1.7 million children in Nepal are engaged in economic activity
• More kids work in the mountains than in any other
• More than 30,000 child laborers work in 1,600 stone quarries in Nepali
• More than one million kids in Nepal work without pay and many work as bonded laborers