Kailash Satyarthi

Kailash Satyarthi (born January 11, 1954, Vidisha, Madhya Pradesh, India) is an Indian social reformer who campaigned against child labor in India and elsewhere and advocated the universal right to education. In 2014 he was the corecipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, along with teenage Pakistani education advocate Malala Yousafzai, “for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.”

Sharma was born to a Brahman police officer and a homemaker. As a child he formed a football (soccer) club to raise money to help pay the school fees of underprivileged students and campaigned for the development of a textbook bank for them as well. He attended Samrat Ashok Technological Institute in Vidisha, earning a degree in electrical engineering in 1974. Sharma then pursued graduate work and taught at the institute for two years. In 1977 he relocated to New Delhi, where he worked for a publisher of literature for Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform movement. Sharma later exchanged his Brahman (or high-caste) surname for “Satyarthi,” which was derived from Satyarth Prakash (Light of Truth), a volume written (1875) by Dayananda Sarasvati, the founder of Arya Samaj. Dayananda had urged reforms such as the abolition of the caste system and child marriages in addition to advocating a return to a literal interpretation of the Hindu Vedas.

Motivated by those principles, Satyarthi established a magazine, Sangharsh Jaari Rahega (“The Struggle Will Continue”), which documented the lives of vulnerable people. He grew increasingly concerned by the prevalence of child labor in India, which was regulated only by a sparse patchwork of legislation. Pervasive poverty frequently led to the repayment of parental debt through the bonded servitude of their children. Satyarthi began working under the tutelage of Swami Agnivesh, an Arya Samaj adherent and activist who advocated on behalf of women and children. He later broke away from the more religiously motivated activism of his mentor and in 1980 founded the nonprofit Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA; “Save the Childhood Movement”). Agnivesh, with whom Satyarthi retained an alternatingly close and antagonistic relationship, founded the more legislatively focused Bandhua Mukti Morcha (BMM; “Bonded Labor Liberation Front”) in 1981.

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The BBA took a radically confrontational approach, with members descending on guarded brick and carpet factories (often accompanied by police) and liberating children who had been forced into servitude by their parents in exchange for loans or by lenders hoping to recoup losses incurred by their parents. Satyarthi and his comrades were beaten on multiple occasions, and several members of the organization were assassinated in retribution. The BBA claimed to have freed thousands of children and by the 1990s had established several ashrams where the newly unfettered youths could reacclimate and begin their educations. Bal Mitra Gram (BMG), a program for “child friendly” villages in which child labor was banned and all children were enrolled in school, was launched in 2011, and several years later some 350 villages had adopted it.

Satyarthi urged the BBA toward international cooperation as well. His efforts led to the formation in 1989 of the South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude (SACCS), which partnered NGOs and unions in nearby Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. In 1994 Satyarthi launched RugMark (now GoodWeave), an initiative to certify that carpets had not been manufactured by children. The organization was credited with major reductions in the use of child labor in the rug-making industry, though in India it drew criticism for accepting German funds owing to that country’s competing carpet industry. Satyarthi also helped to catalyze the 1998 Global March Against Child Labor, a series of demonstrations and marches across some 100 countries in which more than seven million people participated. The movement resulted in the passage (1999) of the Convention Concerning the Prohibition and Immediate Action for the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labour by the International Labour Organization (ILO) of the UN and coalesced into a permanent international collective. In 1999 Satyarthi was among the cofounders of the Global Campaign for Education, which championed education as a universal human right, and in 2001 he became a founding member of the UNESCO High-Level Group on Education for All.

Satyarthi’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize with young Pakistani education reformer Malala Yousafzai in 2014 was largely heralded as a long-overdue acknowledgement of the human rights struggles of children. However, some Indian and Pakistani publications lambasted the Nobel committee’s choice as a ponderously symbolic call to political and religious rapprochement between the two countries.