Activity › Discussion › Essay › Kailash Satyarthi › Reply To: Kailash Satyarthi
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Kailash Satyarthi, born on January 11, 1954, is a human rights activist from India. He has been the leader of the global movement to end child slavery and exploitation since the year 1980 when he gave up his productive career as an electrical engineer to inaugurate a crusade against child confinement. As an activist, Kailash and the grassroots movement founded by him, Bachpan Bachao Andolan, have freed more than 83,000 children from exploitation. He had also originated a successful model for their proper education, restoration, and reintegration into mainstream society. As a worldwide campaigner, he has also been the architect of the one and only largest civil society network for the most exploited children, the Global March Against Child Labour. It is a worldwide alliance of children’s rights organizations, teachers’ unions, and trade unions. His struggles led to the adoption of ILO Convention 182 on the worst practices of child labor in the year 1999. He is also the founding president of the Global Campaign for Education. It is a civil society movement working to terminate the global education crisis and GoodWeave International for promoting consumer awareness and positive action in the carpet industry.
Since his childhood, Kailash has always questioned the wrong and could not let the wrong things prevail in the world. It was his first day at school when he saw an incident that moved him deeply. He saw a small boy working with his cobbler father rather than going to school. He could not understand why that boy was different from him. He then asked his teacher regarding that small boy but was ignored. Then, later he asked the same question from his headmaster who explained to him that it was absolutely normal for the poor children to work for their living. But he was not convinced with the answer. He remembered once when his parents told him that everyone in the world is born to do good deeds, attain good education, get a good job, and earn some respect for themselves. It was very difficult for him to understand the situation then. Many incidents like this took place and then he decided to eradicate child labor from our society.