Child migrants lose childhood to hard labour

​Narayankhed: The migration of people from Narayankhed looking for work elsewhere has begun, with a cavalcade of bullock carts, carrying children and elders everywhere on the highways of Sangareddy district.

Around this time, year after year, many of the families here leave their homes to go and work in sugarcane fields of Sangareddy, Medak and Nizamabad districts. Some go to neighbouring areas in Karnataka.

On Thursday, at least 20 bullock carts were seen parked at a stadium next to MRO office in Narayankhed town, where the migrants chose to spend the night on the way to Sangareddy and other places.Some of the migrants are from Manoor, Chalki and other mandals in Narayankhed.

Parents take along with them children to work in these fields for harvesting sugarcane. They come back only after the entire crop is harvested.

This year the work may be completed soon because sugarcane was sown in only 31 per cent of the normal area last kharif. There has also been a huge crop loss due to drought and heavy rains.

Notwithstanding tall claims about proper implementation of The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009, most of the children leave school in the middle of the year to migrate along with their parents.

Some of these are out-of-school children. No wonder, almost all children in Narayankhed are losing scope for education.

When The Hans India spoke to District Education Officer L Chandrakala about the arrangements made to keep their education going in spite of the annual migration, she claimed that these children would be accommodated in schools of the villages where the harvest takes place.

She said that the District Collector had approved 14 camps across the district to offer education to children whose parents were being employed by sugarcane farmers and that additional schools would soon be approved.

“The responsibility is on the Mandal Education Officers to ensure that these children do not get affected by the migration,” she said.

All told, no effort is being made to survey, document and act after determining exactly how many children come to Sangareddy district.

Children come from Bihar, Odisha, and Chhattisgarh as well as from Rayalaseema, Mahbubnagar and Narayankhed as these are the principal areas from where migrants depart around this time of the year to work in cotton fields, brick kilns, sugarcane fields and construction sites.